Free Air by Sinclair Lewis

Free Air by Sinclair Lewis

'An American story in every page...amusing, interesting, alive to its final period' - "New York Times". '[Lewis] really seems to catch the sweep and exhilaration of the great open country over which his characters wind their way' - "New Republic". Fame was just around the corner when Sinclair Lewis published "Free Air" in 1919, a year before "Main Street". The latter novel zeroed in on the town of Gopher Prairie; the former stopped there briefly and then took the reader by automobile in search of America. "Free Air" heads toward a West that was brimming with possibilities for suddenly mobile Americans at the end of a world war. The vehicle in Lewis' novel, not a Model T but a Gomez-Dep roadster, takes Claire Boltwood and her father from Minnesota to Seattle, exposing them all to the perils of early motoring. On the road, the upper-crust Boltwoods are at once more insignificant and more noble.The greatest distance to be overcome is the social one between Claire and a young mechanic named Milt, who, with a cat as his traveling companion, follows close behind. If "Free Air" anticipates many of the themes of Lewis' later novels, it also looks forward to a genre that includes John Steinbeck's "Travels with Charley and Josh Greenfeld" and Paul Mazursky's "Harry and Tonto". And the character of Claire, blazing her own trail across the West, looks back to the nineteenth-century pioneer woman and ahead to the independent-minded movie heroines played by Katherine Hepburn. In his introduction Robert E. Fleming discusses the place of this early novel in Lewis' canon. A professor of English and associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of New Mexico, he is the author of "James Weldon Johnson".

The son of a country doctor, Harry Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) was born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota. His childhood and early youth were spent in the Midwest, and later he attended Yale University, where he was editor of the literary magazine. After graduating in 1907, he worked as a reporter and in editorial positions at various newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses from the East Coast to California. He was able to give this work up after a few of his stories had appeared in magazines and his first novel, Our Mr. Wrenn (1914), had been published. Main Street (1920) was his first really successful novel, and his reputation was secured by the publication of Babbitt (1922). Lewis was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith (1925) but refused to accept the honor, saying the prize was meant to go to a novel that celebrated the wholesomeness of American life, something his books did not do. He did accept, however, when in 1930 he became the first American writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. During the last part of his life, he spent a great deal of time in Europe and continued to write both novels and plays. In 1950, after completing his last novel, World So Wide (1951), he intended to take an extended tour but became ill and was forced to settle in Rome, where he spent some months working on his poems before dying.

Michael Meyer, PhD, a professor of English at the University of Connecticut, previously taught at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the College of William and Mary. His scholarly articles have appeared in such periodicals as American Literature, Studies in the American Renaissance, and Virginia Quarterly Review. An internationally recognized authority on Henry David Thoreau, he is a former president of the Thoreau Society and the coauthor of The New Thoreau Handbook, a standard reference. His first book, Several More Lives to Live: Thoreau's Political Reputation in America, was awarded the Ralph Henry Gabriel Prize by the American Studies Association. In addition to The Bedford Introduction to Literature, his edited volumes include Frederick Douglass: The Narrative and Selected Writings.

Gary Scharnhorst is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the University of New Mexico, editor of American Literary Realism, and editor in alternating years of American Literary Scholarship.

SKU	Nicht verfügbar
ISBN 13	9780803279438
ISBN 10	0803279434
Titel	Free Air
Autor	Sinclair Lewis
Buchzustand	Nicht verfügbar
Bindungsart	Paperback
Verlag	University of Nebraska Press
Erscheinungsjahr	1993-04-01
Seitenanzahl	370
Hinweis auf dem Einband	Die Abbildung des Buches dient nur Illustrationszwecken, die tatsächliche Bindung, das Cover und die Auflage können sich davon unterscheiden.
Hinweis	Nicht verfügbar