Letter from Sinclair Lewis to Marcella Powers, August 15, 1942

              PICTURESQUELY LOCATED ON THE BEAUTIFUL BIG WOODS PENINSULA BETWEEN BIG GULL LAKE AND LAKE MARGARET
Kuttger's Sherwood Forest Lodge
E. A. RUTTGER, MANAGING OWNER
Postoffice [sic]: Route 5
Brainerd, Minn.



-- Saturday, August 15 --

I got to write to you -- even though I haven't a thing to say, except that I love you -- just to show you what stationery we have in Minnesota,

Stopping over here last night and tonight to give the boys a chance to fish in one more lake, before we return to Minnetonka -- where, naturally, they'll fish, till Micky
goes back, the end of next week......leaving me to spend
all my time at the hair-dresser’s, the perfumer's, the gold-smith's, the bootmaker's, in preparation for my going East....in two weeks, darling. 

……

If I had never appreciated being with you, travelling with you, I would after a jaunt with Micky.   You are sometimes in a flash of bad temper; sometimes you are bored by people or scenes that delight my Edgar Guest pantheism.   But it's a joy to be with you, .97 % of the time. With Micky, about .17 % of the time.   He's too damn much like his mother: highly intelligent (about lifeless facts, bits of information), quick, sometimes of fantastic humor; but so arrogant, so dictatorial, so ready to sneer, that he keeps himself and everybody around him, decidedly including me, in a tension.....He'll either be an enormously important and dominating and not-too-popular leader in something or other; or else he'll be a ghastly failure.....One thing has been splendid: little David, Al Wilson's boy, is so sunny-natured that he has followed the Duke Michael without hesitation even when Micky has, as   frequently, badgered him and teased him hour on hour.

I'm so glad that you and I are slack, sloppy, ambitionless, buffoonishly good-natured at all times, and so careless that we never even arrange the medicine cabinet.   How right Len Lyons was when he referred to us as "The Silly Family, Milly and Hilly, with their pet goat and giant sunflower, in their charming new tarpaper shack on Poverty Row.”
XXX >X<

[typed at the bottom of the Lodge’s stationery]:
A famous lodge of mammoth logs and 20 rustic cabins * Each cabin has split-rock fireplace, bathroom, circulating hot and cold water * Unsurpassed meals in the cool log dining room in the lodge * Famous fishing for walleye pike, black bass, northern pike, crappies, sunfish and brook trout * Planned vacations with a combination of comfort, high-class equipment and personal attention * Safe, hard sand beach and many beach sports * Golf on nearby well-known courses * Playground for children and gentle Shetland ponies * Concrete tennis and shuffleboard courts, archery,
ping pong, swings, slides and the like