Background
Lingeman, Richard Roberts was born on January 2, 1931 in Crawfordsville, Indiana, United States. Son of Byron Newton and Vera Frances (Spencer) Lingeman.
(The critic Edmund Wilson called Sinclair Lewis “one of th...)
The critic Edmund Wilson called Sinclair Lewis “one of the national poets.” In the 1920s, Lewis fired off a fusillade of sensational novels, exploding American shibboleths with a volatile mixture of caricature and photographic realism. With an unerring eye for the American scene and an omnivorous ear for American talk, he mocked such sacrosanct institutions as the small town (Main Street), business (Babbitt), medicine (Arrowsmith), and religion (Elmer Gantry). His shrewdly observed characters became part of the American gallery, and his titles became part of the language. Despite his books’ innate subversiveness, they were bestsellers and widely discussed—–and almost as widely damned. They had small-towners worried about being called “Main Streeters,” preachers fearful of being branded “Elmer Gantrys,” and Babbitts defiant of being labeled “Babbitts.” Lewis touched a nerve among Americans who secretly yearned for something more from life than hustling, making money, and buying new cars. Lewis danced along the fault line between the old, small-town, frugal, conservative, fundamentalist America and the modernist, big-business-dominated, youth-obsessed, advertising-powered consumer society that was reshaping the American character in the iconoclastic 1920s. For all his use of humor and satire, Lewis probed serious themes: feminism (The Job, Main Street, Ann Vickers), commercial pressures on science (Arrowsmith), racial prejudice (Kingsblood Royal), and native fascism (It Can’t Happen Here). In 1930, he became the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he feared he could never live up to it. In his heart, he was a scold with a conscience, a harsh truth-teller who laughed out loud. His novels, born out of a passionate conviction that America could be better, are thus as alive today as when they were written. Bringing to bear newly uncovered correspondence, diaries, and criticism, Richard Lingeman, distinguished biographer of Theodore Dreiser, paints a sympathetic portrait—–in all its multihued contradictions—–of a seminal American writer who could be inwardly the loneliest of men and outwardly as gregarious as George Follansbee Babbitt himself. Lingeman writes with sympathy and understanding about Lewis’s losing struggle with alcoholism; his stormy marriages, including one to the superwoman Dorothy Thompson, whose fame as a newspaper columnist in the 1930s outshone Lewis’s fading star as a novelist; and his wistful, autumnal love for an actress more than thirty years younger than he. Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street evokes with color and verve the gaudy life and times of this prairie Mercutio out of Sauk Centre, Minnesota.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679438238/?tag=2022091-20
(Now an abridged edition of two highly acclaimed volumes P...)
Now an abridged edition of two highly acclaimed volumes Praise for Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City, 1871–1907 "Dreiser’s life has never been more vividly told. Lingeman’s definitive book reveals the tough, uncompromising impulse that led Dreiser, disdaining style, to slug with such knockout power." —Studs Terkel "Scrupulously, massively—devotedly—constructed; everything is in it. And it is immaculately rendered." —Cynthia Ozick The New York Times Book Review "An intimate and revealing portrait…a solid, honorable and perceptive book." —Jonathan Yardley The Washington Post Book World "A remarkable book packed with vivid reminiscences, personal anecdotes and thorough research that brings Dreiser’s prodigious, moving story, his turbulent era and the man himself truly alive." —Don Skiles San Francisco Chronicle Praise for Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey, 1908–1945 Chicago Sun-Times Book of the Year, 1990 "A fascinating documentation of the most troubled life led by any important modern American writer." —Alfred Kazin The New York Times Book Review "It is hard to imagine that anything new or different will be said about Dreiser for a long time to come. Whatever a definitive biography may be, this is surely it." —Charles Fecher Chicago Tribune
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0471574260/?tag=2022091-20
Lingeman, Richard Roberts was born on January 2, 1931 in Crawfordsville, Indiana, United States. Son of Byron Newton and Vera Frances (Spencer) Lingeman.
Bachelor, Haverford College, 1953; postgraduate, Yale University Law School, 1956-1958; postgraduate, Columbia University Graduate School Comparative Literature, 1958-1960.
Executive editor, Monocle magazine, New York City, 1960-1969; associate editor, columnist, New York Times Book Review, 1969-1978; executive editor, The Nation, New York City, 1978-1995; senior editor, The Nation, New York City, since 1995. Board directors Small Town Institute.
(Now an abridged edition of two highly acclaimed volumes P...)
(Small Town America: A Narrative History 1620 - The Presen...)
(The critic Edmund Wilson called Sinclair Lewis “one of th...)
(The title is: Theodore Dreiser At the Gates of the City 1...)
(light edge wear 12mo - over 6¾" - 7¾" tall. Trade Paperback.)
(An American Journey)
President 12 W. 96th Street Corporation, 2004-2008. With United States Army, 1953-1956. Member Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists association, Authors Guild, Society of America Historians, New York History Society, Phi Beta Kappa.
Married Anthea Judy Nicholson, April 3, 1965. 1 child, Jenifer Kate.