Sinclair Lewis

Adventures in Autobumming Sinclair Lewis

It is almost unheard of that a book-length work by an important author is not published as a book until almost a century after it was written. This work was published as a series of three articles in the Saturday Evening Post in December 1919 and January 1920-articles that are very difficult to find. We are proud to make this work generally available by being the first to publish it as a book. This is an unusual book for Sinclair Lewis because it is written with a different style of humor than his other books.

It is the story of his travels around America in his Model T Ford. He sums up his wanderings when he says:

"I remember Southern ferries where you help the ferryman to pole your way across the yellow stream; Western fords where you splash through a torrent and instantly shoot up a mountain rise; Tennessee cabins as aboriginal as in the days of Dan'l Boone; St. Ignatius, that Alpine town with unmistakably Italian convent and mission tower, which nevertheless is in Montana; old Rockbridge Alum Springs, where once the flower of Virginia and the Carolinas rode and danced and made love; young Mennonites in Pennsylvania with silky chin whiskers, grotesque under their pink cheeks; a Shaker settlement of vast barns in a valley between Albany and Pittsfield; a road between Bemidji and Duluth through pines impressive as columns of an Egyptian temple, broken only by infrequent clearings where Indians looked up from cultivating corn to hold up a stolid arm in greeting; cowpunchers riding range in Oregon-in chaps even to-day; the climb up out of Pittsburgh like crawling up the side of a smoking caldron."