Grattis Sinclair!

ON a hill by the Mississippi where Chippewas camped two generations ago, a girl stood in relief against the cornflower blue of Northern sky. She saw no Indians now; she saw flour-mills and the blinking windows of skyscrapers in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Nor was she thinking of squaws and portages, and the Yankee fur-traders whose shadows were all about her. She was meditating upon walnut fudge, the plays of Brieux, the reasons why heels run over, and the fact that the chemistry instructor had stared at the new coiffure which concealed her ears.

A breeze which had crossed a thousand miles of wheat-lands bellied her taffeta skirt in a line so graceful, so full of animation and moving beauty, that the heart of a chance watcher on the lower road tightened to wistfulness over her quality of suspended freedom. She lifted her arms, she leaned back against the wind, her skirt dipped and flared, a lock blew wild. A girl on a hilltop; credulous, plastic, young; drinking the air as she longed to drink life. The eternal aching comedy of expectant youth.

It is Carol Milford, fleeing for an hour from Blodgett College.

The days of pioneering, of lassies in sunbonnets, and bears killed with axes in piney clearings, are deader now than Camelot; and a rebellious girl is the spirit of that bewildered empire called the American Middlewest.

Så börjar Sinclair Lewis bok "Main Street"

Sinclair Lewis

7 februari 1885 - 10 januari 1951

7 mars 1914

Skam till sägandes har jag bara läst några få av hans böcker, men det borde inte vara så svårt att råda bot på — flera av hans böcker finns hos Gutenberg, men inte "It Can't Happen Here", vilken är den boken jag är mest nyfiken på. Men den finns hos Bokus — där man får 198 träffar på hans namn.

...för hans starka och levande skildringskonst, 

med typskapande förmåga, med kvickhet och humor.

Så lyder en del av motivationen till att han erhöll Nobelpriset 1930.