On The Road, Summer 2007, Minneapolis, Minnesota, photo © 2007 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.
In September 2007, I finished reading On The Road. It was the day the book turned 50. I have this thing for Kerouac. I consider him the James Dean of writers. I guess I’m easily swayed by myth.
On The Road didn’t sweep me off my feet like James Baldwin’s Another Country or Giovanni’s Room. And it wasn’t understated and elegant like John Williams and Stoner. The book dragged in places. The relationships were passionate but doomed. And I couldn’t understand why Sal clung to the inconsiderate, egotistical Dean like the stabilizing, wagging tail of a kite.
The story didn’t find ground for me until I found myself sweeping across the yellow prairies of Nebraska, pounding through the arid, western Colorado desert, and driving over the mountainous Continental Divide. I like Kerouac because he was a boundary buster. He helped other boundary busters – the artists, writers, poets, and musicians of his time – find their voices. He changed the definition of writer.
There has been a lot of hoopla over On The Road in the last year. Primarily because the 120-foot, $2.4 million dollar scroll he wrote it on (over 20 days in April of 1951) is touring the country. But Jack didn’t write On The Road in 3 weeks. He’d been gathering, composting, scribbling in a pocket notebook, and dreaming about it for years. He was a disciplined writer who sat down between travels and wrote with a vengeance. He had been living this story a long, long time.
On the eve of the book’s publication, Kerouac was so poor he had to borrow money for a bus ticket to New York from Joyce Johnson, his girlfriend at the time. When the book became famous, he’d been done with it for several years. And after he hit it big, Johnson recalls mobs around him at parties: “Women wanted him to make love to them and all the men wanted to fight him.”
One of the best Kerouac accounts I’ve seen is the Audrey Sprenger interview by Jeffrey Brown that aired on the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour, September 5th, 2007. Sprenger takes an honest look at Kerouac, beyond the myth, to see the writer as he was:
I think the continuing popularity of the book stems from the fact that Jack Kerouac was brave enough to defy social convention and comfort to do quite a radical thing, which was to simply be in the world and write about it. He was a deeply, deeply disciplined writer who was committed to documenting America every day as it was lived by people, and I think that he really captured the ways that people lived and spoke. And that is what he was committed to as an artist, trying to develop a new way of American writing which would be evocative of how people actually lived, whether or not it followed the rules of grammar or literary convention.
-Audrey Sprenger, Sociologist, interview from On The Road, Kerouac’s 50th Anniversary Celebrated
Kerouac died young, in 1969, at age 47. Was it alcohol, stress, Benzedrine, fame? Perhaps a deadly combination. We may never know. But On the Road continues to sell over 100,000 copies every year. I count myself among the minions.
Not all reviews are favorable. Suzanne Vega wasn’t a big Kerouac fan even after her Book Of Dreams. Herbert Gold didn’t give On The Road a good review at its release in 1957. But I tend to fall in the same camp as Kerouac scholar Douglas Brinkley, and can get behind what he says in a 2002 NPR article by Renee Montagne, Kerouac’s On The Road:
If you read On the Road, it’s a valentine to the United States. All this is pure poetry for almost a boy’s love for his country that’s just gushing in its adjectives and descriptions. You know, Kerouac used to say, ‘Anybody can make Paris holy, but I can make Topeka holy.’
I’m saving the best for last. Like the writers before him, Kerouac wrote haiku. He loved to do readings in Jazz clubs in New York. You can hear him recite Some American Haikus (a few of my favorites: the bottoms of my shoes, nightfall, in the morning frost) and read the history of his recorded haiku at Kerouac Speaks. It’s a gift to hear a writer step inside his own voice.
After decades of never making it past the first few chapters, I’ve finally completed On The Road. And discovered Kerouac’s haiku in the process. It only took me 30 years. Who knows what my blocks were to reading it. Every book has its time.
I’ll end with an excerpt from Part III:
In the spring of 1949 I had a few dollars saved from my GI education checks and I went to Denver, thinking of settling down there. I saw myself in Middle America, a patriarch. I was lonesome. Nobody was there – no Babe Rawlins, Ray Rawlins, Tim Gray, Betty Gray, Roland Major, Dean Moriarty, Carlo Marx, Ed Dunkel, Roy Johnson, Tommy Snark, nobody.
I wandered around Curtis Street and Larimer Street, worked a while in the wholesale fruit market where I almost got hired in 1947 – the hardest job of my life; at one point the Japanese kids and I had to move a whole boxcar a hundred feet down the rail by hand with a jackgadget that made it move a quarter-inch with each yank. I hugged watermelon crates over the ice floor of reefers into the blazing sun, sneezing. In God’s name and under the stars, what for?
At dusk I walked. I felt like a speck on the surface of the sad red earth. I passed the Windsor Hotel, where Dean Moriarty had lived with his father in the depression thirties, and as of yore I looked everywhere for the sad and fabled tinsmith of my mind. Either you find someone who looks like your father in places like Montana or you look for a friend’s father where he is no more.
–On The Road, Jack Kerouac, 1957
-posted on red Ravine, Thursday, November 29th, 2007
-related to post, Kerouac Goes To War
Thank you, QM, for another meaty, well-researched post on a great writer and literary icon. When I first saw this go up, I read through it quickly. Didn’t have a chance to comment. Now I can comment, although I haven’t clicked on the links and seen what all you’ve tucked away for us here. I can’t wait to hear the haiku readings.
I know this is superficial, but wasn’t Kerouac a hunk? I mean, no wonder between the rebellion in his living and writing and the way he looked that women wanted him. Also, there is something absolutely appealing about that rebel persona. More than other writers, perhaps, Kerouac was writer-as-artist.
The other thing I want to say is yesterday or day before I was on someone’s blog out there, and she had a photo of a set of Kerouac books that she’d bought when she was 18. I commented on her post, and today when I saw your post I wanted to go back to her post and point her to yours. But for the life of me, I couldn’t remember who she was. So, if anyone knows what blogger I’m talking about, please let me know.
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p.s., more comments to come as I delve into the links.
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It’s nice to see another fan of not only Kerouac, but the mighty haiku. My sister and I, when I venture north of here to visit at least bi-monthly, tend to find ourselves on the cozy third floor of her house, wine nearby, paper and pen in hand, eyebrows furrowed, furiously writing. we call this game (strangely enough, ha) ‘haiku’. We take turns picking a topic, and then each write a haiku. Sometimes we’ll read our own to each other, sometimes we will switch and read the other’s aloud. There are no winners, no losers, just some thought-provoking ideas thick with twists and turns, and some undeniable laughter. This is the activity I most look forward to when I see her. People think we’re nerds. I take this compliment with a smile.
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QM,
I’ve never read any Kerouac but I like how you said he was a “boundary buster”. I feel he probably did lead the way for others…one I think fits that category is Edward Abbey.
I assume Kerouac traveled by thumb and other romantic means.
I’ve always been a big fan of road trips and romantic travel modes…romantic in the adventure sense, not love sense.
Anyway…My first true solo multi-day road trip was driving my 1964, 4-cylinder, 5:38 geared (Kaiser) Jeep CJ-5 from SW New Mexico to central Idaho when I was 19 years old. It was a great adventure even though it lasted less than a week. (Every time I started that Jeep it was an adventure) It really opened my eyes and soul to adventure travel.
One version of adventure travel…One of my co-workers, an younger unmarried woman, is traveling to Machu Pichu for Christmas. She is concerned about the money. As spectacular as Machu Pichu sounds, its not too appealing to me; mainly, too many people there. It sounds too commercial.
Another version of adventure travel…My first year in Venezuela, at Christmas, I drove my beater 1986 Ford Corsel (designed in Brazil…made in Venezuela…never available in North America) around the eastern part of the country alone. I didn’t know any Spanish. My only map was what the Lonely Planet guide had. I poked around, found places to stay and met friendly people. Thinking about it now…or what I know now about Venezuela…or what Venezuela has become in the last 8 years (unfortunately it has changed for the worse)…I was lucky to make it. There are lots of bandits on the roads, and the mechanical condition of that car was questionable…probably why I was ignored by most people. That car definately traveled under the radar.
I’ll have to read On The Road someday. Its on my list. Thanks!
MM
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The infamous scroll visited the SF library last year, and I coworker and I went to see it. It was displayed on a long table, rolled up at either end, with perhaps 6 to 8 feet of it displayed. What I liked best were the photos and dioramas of him and his life.
Mimbresman, Kerouac’s protagonist in The Dharma Bums hitchhikes a triangular path (NYC > Mexico City > SF > NYC, if memory serves) but I think they already have a car for most of their trips barreling across the plains in On the Road — is that right, QM?
Good post. I agree that Kerouac’s writing is powerful, yet it also seemed repetitive in places, as if it might be tightened. Still, he definitely took us places we hadn’t been before.
There’s a very good biopic on Kerouac, including interviews with people who knew him. (Might be titled “Kerouac, the Movie”).
In it he does a TV interview during the start of the hippie era where he talks about liking the hippies and wishing them luck, and says he hopes they aren’t hijacked the way the beats were, by “thugs”. I got the sense he meant Ferlinghetti and others.
He also speaks about what “beat” meant to him. That after the war he and many of the people he knew felt beaten down. So he puns that, to some extent, with beatitude.
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ybonesy, that’s pretty cool about the set of Kerouac books. If you discover who it was, let us know. I think collections of books like that are symbols of what we value along the way. I’ve got a few books that I read in Junior High, one being Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. And a whole lot of Poe. I love having them around on my book shelves.
In response to your “hunk” comment about Kerouac, I have to say I agree. He does have a James Deanish quality that I love. Probably part of that for me is that neither of these rebels ever made it to old age. There iconography is frozen in photographs of their handsome, young faces.
I wonder what it is about a rebel that is so appealing? I always felt “different” growing up (and I was) and seemed to be able to best relate to the rebel persona (though I didn’t really get too extreme in acting it out).
It makes me think of who the women rebels were, too. They don’t seem to have been as mythologized as icons like Dean and Kerouac. Women who are rebels are sometimes demonized. I’m just sitting here thinking about which women I consider to be rebels. Maybe Stein, Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, Mabel Dodge, Dorothy Brett…Okay, now I’m starting to form my list.
What about you? What rebels have you been attracted to, literary or otherwise?
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Scaramastra, what a wonderful ritual to do with your sister, the game of haiku. I love it. Do you mind if I adapt it to my visits with some of my family and friends? It sounds like something anyone could enjoy, writer or not.
I have to say I formed a newfound love of haiku when I studied with Natalie Goldberg last year. She had us read Clark Strand’s Seeds From A Birch Tree and then write haiku in silence on a day pilgrimage to Ghost Ranch. It blasted the door wide open for me around haiku and practice.
I was also talking to a writer friend last night about liking poetry. She said she is nearing completion of her own book but just doesn’t “get” poetry at all.
Ironically, her husband is a poet. And now, each night before bed, he reads a poem to her out loud. She said she’s really enjoying this new approach to poetry. And may end up liking it after all! Your line about reading your haiku out loud to each other as part of the game with your sister reminded me of my friend.
Thank you for commenting. It’s always a pleasure to hear from another Kerouac fan.
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Adapt away, QM, for you just might end up playing it with me on one of these visits. 🙂
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mm, you know what strikes me is that your writing about your adventures with bicycling, kayaking, moving to Venezuela, all have an On The Road quality about them. But instead of zooming along cross country, you are moving much more slowly and closer to the earth, deserts, and oceans.
As ben mentions, in On The Road, they are whizzing along in a car, like many of the road trips I have made to Montana, North Dakota, Oregon, Utah, and New Mexico. Once we were in the car and rolling, Kerouac had me. Also the characters he travelled with (my heart was drawn to the Montanans and Minnesotans) were lively in and of themselves.
About Machu Picchu, I wish I had gone when I really had the fire to do it in the early 80’s. It’s lost some of its appeal for me now. But if I was given the opportunity, it is one place I would like to visit some day. It seems like a place that will always hold the great spirit it was founded on – no matter how populated.
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Scaramastra, all the better! I’m ready for a rousing game of haiku. When are you heading this way again?
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ben, I’ll have to check out Kerouac, the Movie. Sounds like something I would like. Films like that tend to enlighten on the time period on which the writer or artist grew up, too, which always influences the writing.
It’s great that you actually saw the Kerouac scroll in SF. I’m not sure if it came this way or not. I would love to see it. There is something about actually being in the presence of the objects that belonged to literary or artistic icons that is quite inspiring. Objects hold energy.
I remember when Liz and I went to see the Diane Arbus show at the Walker. Seeing the sizes of the actual photographs (rather than reproductions) and then, like you mention, the detailed dioramas and photographs was amazing.
The Walker had a couple of the Arbus cameras – one early 35mm and one Rolleiflex medium format twin-lens reflex – on display under Plexiglas. As a photographer, I LOVED seeing those cameras. And the diorama was in a darkened room and was really quite moving with her journals and notebooks and all leading to her eventual suicide.
I like these quotes by Arbus:
I also saw a retrospective of Sylvia Plath which included her journals, tons of photographs, her relationship with Ted Hughes, and eventual suicide. Amazing show.
Now that I think about it, Plath and Arbus were rebels who died young, too.
ybonesy, I’m adding Diane Arbus and Sylvia Plath to my list of rebels. 8)
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QM, it’s usually you heading my way, rather, and even then, not so often, unfortunately.
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Ah, I love a good mystery, Scaramastra. I’ll keep following your clues as you visit red Ravine. 8)
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My mom used to love (and still does) Anthony Quinn, and it was all because of the rugged, rebellion roles he played in movies. Mom comes from rebellion culture, the wild cowboy culture of Cimarron, New Mexico. I think her own background and then her love of rebels influenced me.
Jim and I both love the characters from Edward Abbey’s books (see, you can tell we’re friends with MM), such as Lester Hayduke. I’ll have to think about other male and female rebel figures.
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I would love to see the scroll, does anyone know the cities it is traveling to?
My niece heard an interview Joyce Johnson did, reminiscing about Jack during the 3 weeks he was writing the book. Joyce said he despaired for years before that, never able to get at all that juice he found out there on the road. And when it was finally the time to write it, he was sweating so profusely during the typing that he went through one shirt after another–they were drenched with sweat. The sweat was pouring out of him along with the book. Joyce said they had white shirts on hangers all over their apartment drying.
I’ve always loved that image.
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Sinclair, it’s interesting that you mention, Joyce Johnson, one of the women of the Beat Generation. In my research, I ran into her memoir, Minor Characters. At the time she knew Kerouac, her name was Joyce Glassman.
I also ran into an interesting interview with Carolyn Cassady on Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady (who are both fictionalized in On The Road. Neal is Dean). The interview didn’t quite fit with this piece, but was fascinating all the same.
There was also a book called Women Of The Beat Generation, edited by Brenda Knight. Here’s a little blurb on it:
Here are some links to these items (for anyone interested in learning more about what I think is a fascinating time in history):
Carolyn Cassady – On Allen and Neal Interview with American Legends (LINK)
Women Of The Beat Generation, edited by Brenda Knight on American Legends (LINK)
Oh, and here’s one more:
Homage To Jack on American Legends (LINK)
Sinclair, did you know Jack’s original name was Jean-Louis Kerouac and he renamed himself after Jack London? I thought you might find that interesting. Wasn’t it you that read Call Of The Wild last year?
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Sinclair, BTW, that’s a cool story about the white shirts all over the apartment, drenched in sweat. All from writing. I can imagine it.
Your answer to where the scroll is at the moment? Well. my research turned up that it is in New York:
November 9, 2007 to March 16, 2008: New York Public Library, New York City
Here’s a link to the whole Kerouac Scroll Tour (LINK).
And it’s on the Dharma Beat site (LINK) which has amazing Kerouac links.
BTW, mimbresman, there was also a LINK to Machu Picchu on the Dharma Beat site. Who would have thought it?
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QM,
I didn’t know about the name change from Jean-Louis to Jack. Jack fits him better anyway…more of a hard-living, hard-playing name. His life bears more than one similarity to London’s, doesn’t it?
Thanks for the link to the scroll tour. Maybe I’ll go On The Road to New York to see it.
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gorgeous excerpt…
I always get caught up in your posts about writers. When you write them, your fascination is contagious.
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amuirin, thanks so much for your comment. It makes me so happy there are people out there that appreciate these posts on my favorite writers. I get all pumped up for writing when I write them. I think they are contagious for me, too, and have become part of my practice and my teaching. I want to know everything about the writers I love. You made my day!
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No prob, it is fascinating to hear the different journeys writer’s take that inspired their published words. Great reads!
Wind is going crazy here today, it’s smashed against the house like a bulldozer a few times now. The tree-tops are mesmerizing in this weather.
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Windy here, too. And the wind just picked up when the sun poked out from behind the clouds. I just shoveled the whole deck and hilly driveway from our first winter storm. I don’t feel like a writer as much as a snowblower! Translation – Ben Gay, heating pad, sitting still on the couch with the end of my Ann Patchett book. 8)
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See, this is really the whole noodle baker.
Kerouac’s gift is that he tells a good story, not when you are reading it, but years later when you are driving across the wide expanse of america and you realize that this country is *so* big it almost brings you to tears.
that the spaces in our lives are both of time and of space. that when you were tripping on LSD in tulum it wasn’t the ocean that spun your mind, but your mind that spun the ocean.
you *can* remember your parents before you were born.
I dig the writing. It is kind of uncanny. I grew up in virginia, and somehow ended up in minneapolis. love made me do it. but that is ok, that is the best excuse i (we?) keep telling myself. the first night in minnesota she took me to bryant lake bowl and i had a two hearted. it was a type of destiny that i can only understand now.
i could tell you about taos, i could tell you about the spotted cow. i could tell you about the sangre de cristo, about the earthships, about the kind, kind *kind*, but somehow you have already been there.
richard brautigan and bill frisell would complete the circle.
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Wow, ed, I just have to say your comment has a lot of poetry to it.
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ed, somehow I missed your comment a few days ago and I can’t tell you how delighted I am to see it. I’m happy to get back to books, authors, and writing. Alas, you sound like another Southerner eventually transplanted to the Midwest. (I love Bryant Lake Bowl. The girl’s got taste! I think the last time I was there, I actually bowled with some friends. It was a blast.)
But Kerouac, you are right. It is later when you’re driving cross-country by yourself, only the hum of the rubber on the road, that his words dawn on you. He’s got that kind of parallel universe thing going on. And he is a good storyteller. It’s odd, but in his rebellious way, he made me feel amazingly patriotic (in that romantic kind of way). I’m guessing that’s why the soldiers I wrote about in Kerouac Goes To War (LINK) take On the Road along with them to Iraq.
I really appreciate your comment. Yesterday I was at a thrift store with Liz and she spotted the book, Main Street by Sinclair Lewis (first published in 1920). I picked it up and read the first few paragraphs; he had me hooked. His details are amazing, a story about life in a Midwest town. Well, I bought the yellowed copy for 50 cents. It’s from 1961 (and smells just like 1961). I can’t wait to read it.
The book starts like this:
Very poetic. I’ll try to come back and comment when I finish it. If anyone else has read it, I’d be happy to hear what they think as well.
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I’m reading more of Sinclar Lewis’ Main Street over lunch. Remind me again why I don’t make time to read even more great literature from the past? Lunch time reading is such a gift. I forget everything and get lost in the book for a while. 8)
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Just reading the first few paragraphs you’ve written here makes me want to read Main Street again. I fell in love with Sinclair’s writing when I read this book, and with the protagonist Carol. Please keep checking in as you move through the book!
Sinclair Lewis grew up a few miles away from my own hometown. I am drawn to his sensibilities like a moth to the flame. I have had reason to be in his native Sauk Centre hundreds of times, and almost always find a reason to go sit outside his boyhood home, visit his grave, go to the Palmer House where he worked behind the desk, or walk through the Visitor’s Center near the Interstate. I could go on and on about all Sinclair Lewis has taught me, even though he died ten years before I was born.
Perhaps you’ll take a road trip yourself after you finish Main Street, hmmm?
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Sinclair, this is the first book I’ve read by Sinclair Lewis. I remember going to Sauk Centre on a trip with Liz. We were on the way to North Dakota and stopped in Sauk Centre to check out the park there where they pay tribute to Sinclair.
Is that the Visitor’s Center? That day we were too late and the house was closed. But we walked around the park.
If you visit this post again, remind me where the Palmer House is in relation to the Visitor Center. And then, where is his grave? I’d love to visit that sometime. I like to visit where writers spent a lot of time, grew up, lived, died.
Yes, I want to go back to Sauk Centre for sure after I finish the book. I like his detail. And the writing is very poetic. It’s funny, but I put almost everything from the 1920’s into the context of Mabel building her house in Taos, or everything going on in Paris in the 1920’s. Imagine, all these writers and artists coexisting across the world!
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I’m pretty sure Sinclair Lewis had moved to New York by the time he wrote Main Street. After he graduated from high school in Sauk Centre, he moved away for good. His hometown wildly rejected him after Main Street became an overnight sensation (they felt insulted by the book), but after he won the Pulitzer and Nobel Prize for Literature they softened. He went back occasionally to visit, and in the end has his ashes buried in the city cemetery.
The Visitor’s Center is right off the interstate. You can watch a 15 minute video about his childhood, and walk through a display about his books and life. There is a little park surrounding it, likely where you and Liz were. If you head downtown, the Palmer House is on the corner of “Original Main Street” and “Sinclair Lewis Avenue.” It’s the major intersection in town. The Palmer House has a great little diner and an old-fashioned hotel. The owner claims it is haunted (she likes the idea of that), and every Halloween there is some write-up in one of the papers about the noises guests hear in the night. If you turn right at the Palmer House and head to the edge of town, you’ll find the cemetery. Sinclair’s grave is well-marked. If you turn left at the Palmer House his boyhood home is one block down on the right. It is open a lot in the summer, not so much during the colder months. It is on the National Register of Historic Places.
Sinclair had a lonely, difficult childhood. His mom died when he was six, and his father was an emotionally distant physician. Sinclair was teased, didn’t fit in, was the quiet, bookish type, and had terrible acne. I doubt he was nominated Most Likely To Succeed by his classmates.
He showed them.
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Sinclair, thank you so much for all this information. You know a TON about Sinclair Lewis. Now I want to go back to Sauk Centre more than ever. I love going to places that writers lived and grew up in. There’s just something magical about being around all that past energy.
I believe her about the ghosts 8) . I bet they are hanging around there. When we were in Hibbing a few years ago, Liz took a shot in Hibbing High School and it was full of orbs. We couldn’t believe how many spirits were floating around there. The camera captures that energy. Especially digital photography. I think the digital energy is more aligned to things like that than film.
Sounds like Sinclair had to overcome a lot to get down to his writing. I’m surprised he wanted to go back and be buried in Minnesota after all that. I guess it says a lot about our roots, eh?
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Sinclair died alone in Italy. Like so many writers who came before us: alcoholism. His will specified cremation and the cemetery in Sauk Centre. His presence is so powerful there in his hometown, though most of the people walk around unseeing. Not unlike the characters in Main Street.
Where are you in the book, QM? Has Carol moved to Gopher Prairie yet?
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Sinclair, ah, sad. Sounds like a good day trip sometime. I am not very far into the book yet. I didn’t read much this weekend. I can’t remember the last time I sat down and read over the weekend. I used to do that all the time. Now I read more in my spare time during the week. I’ll keep you posted as I move through the book. Thanks for all the great info on Sinclair.
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[…] over the last month. I’m in the middle of Natalie Goldberg’s Old Friend From Far Away, Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, and a book of Best American Essays – 1999. Not one of them have I […]
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