Books with author Richard Lingeman

In this definitive biography, 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.Nobel Prize-winning novelist Sinclair Lewis mocked such sacrosanct institutions as the small town (Main Street), business (Babbitt), medicine (Arrowsmith), and religion (Elmer Gantry). In this definitive biography, 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.

The tragic events of September 11, 2001 brought to the surface memories of an earlier time of unprecedented national emergency—Pearl Harbor—and America's subsequent involvement in World War II. In this evocative cultural history, Richard Lingeman re-creates the events—historic, humorous, and tragic—and personalities of the American home front. From V-girls and V-mail, blackouts and the internment of the Japanese, to new opportunities for African-Americans and women, Lingeman recaptures a unique time in American history in this New York Times Notable Book.

The tragic events of September 11, 2001 brought to the surface memories of an earlier time of unprecedented national emergency—Pearl Harbor—and America's subsequent involvement in World War II. In this evocative cultural history, Richard Lingeman re-creates the events—historic, humorous, and tragic—and personalities of the American home front. From V-girls and V-mail, blackouts and the internment of the Japanese, to new opportunities for African-Americans and women, Lingeman recaptures a unique time in American history in this New York Times Notable Book.

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.

The tragic events of September 11, 2001 brought to the surface memories of an earlier time of unprecedented national emergency-Pearl Harbor-and America's subsequent involvement in World War II. In this evocative cultural history, Richard Lingeman re-creates the events-historic, humorous, and tragic-and personalities of the American home front. From V-girls and V-mail, blackouts and the internment of the Japanese, to new opportunities for African-Americans and women, Lingeman recaptures a unique time in American history in this New York Times Notable Book.

Don't You Know There's a War On is a classic of significant popular history. Don't You Know There's a War On is the story of what happened in the United States between Pearl Harbor and VJ day. It is a thorough re-creation of the events, sometimes ludicrous and sometimes tragic, and personalities that left their mark upon America during a period of transition and the people. The girls in v-mail, will run and Henry Kaiser, dollar-a-year men, Sidney Hillman and Rosie the riveter, Ernie Pyle, and the voice of the turtle, Brian Colak and don't sit under the apple tree, blackouts and the interment of the Japanese. Six years in the research and writing, the book exhibits as sharp eye for small revelatory details such as civil defense measures in Wyoming, milk shortages in Texas, and one armed outfielders - as for large and crucial subjects, such as the response of industry to war and shifting population patterns that challenge the face of the nation.