In this definitive biography of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Sinclair Lewis, Richard Lingeman presents an empathetic, absorbing, and balanced portrait of an eccentric alcoholic-workaholic whose novels and stories exploded shibboleths with a volatile mixture of caricature and realism. Drawing on newly uncovered correspondence, diaries, and criticism, Lingeman gives new life to this prairie Mercutio out of Sauk Centre, Minnesota.
Richard Lingeman vividly recreates the momentous years between VJ Day in 1945 and the beginning of the Korean War in 1950—America’s postwar period, the “age of anxiety” characterized by the onset of the Red Scare and a nascent resistance to the growing Cold War consensus.The psychological hangover of World War II merged with burgeoning anti-communist paranoia and created a dark mood, a “postwar noir” phenomenon. The Noir Forties saw the arrival of McCarthyism and a bleak distortion of American political culture. Lingeman traces the attitudes, hopes and fears, prejudices, and collective dreams and nightmares of the times, as reflected in the media, popular culture, political movements, opinion polls, and psychological studies.Richard Lingeman has created a memorable portrait of what the American people lived, dreamed, and thought during the period that became the crucible in which the destiny of the next forty years was settled.