Letter from Sinclair Lewis to Marcella Powers, April 29, 1942

              3d'  SINCLAIR   LEWIS  Excelsior  Wednesday, April 29  You can't tell — I might really get down to hard work  on The Novel yet. But before I let myself in for anything so catastrophic, I've taken another two days of  exploring. Jim Hart and I spent all of Monday and  Tuesday in further explorations of the lovely hill country in the Southeastern part of the state, staying  over night in a not-bad lil country hotel.  We found the most impressive thing! a two-thousand-  acre estate, of deep woods, most of them virgin timber  —■ which is an almost unhear-of thing anywhere in the  U.S., and several tenant farms, and a brick store dating  from about 1862 and still full of ancient bonnets and  corsets and so on, the store in entrancing rosy old  brick with a white balcony.  The estate is now ewned  by the grandson of the man who founded it; he is a  small-town banker but filled with pride of the old place,  and trying to keep it intact, though the taxes eat up  almost all he earns. The middle-generation, the banker's  father, was that rare thing-a landed-gentleman-radical,  and he was one of the founders of the Farmer-Labor party  here. History, by G-od, but history in a setting of  a deep valley quite like Vermont, with the thick, high*,  heavily wooded hills on either side; and from the top  of the road, as it crosses the hills, entrancing little  secret green valleys which have been nibbled by sheep  and cattle till they are like lawns.  Now to work?  I am meekly trying to follow your injunctions and not  let Joseph let the household run down again.  I have  given him almost the first real full-dress bawling out  I have ever indulged in, on the topic: Many days I  would like to have here better food than I would have  at the average lunch-wagon In this attitude of high  valor and dictatorship I shall continue, until I seer  my boss and her Ma step disdainfully out of the ttrain  at Minneapolis, look at a cement tubular grain-elevator,  and sniff, ""Is that one of those river-bluffs you have  been writing about?""  and I shall whimper,  ""N-no,  dolling.,8  C. Wellington Milquetoast