Letter from Sinclair Lewis to Marcella Powers, October 5, 1942

              SINCLAIR   LEWIS  Monday, October 5    At the entrance to the River Inn in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, a town of 10,000, there is a ""souvenir"" store, not bad for a town of that size; actually has some books -- a feature not invariable in small-town book stores....I go in for my evening Fergus Falls Journal, after the day's motoring, to see what movie I shall attend this Friday evening; hitherto, on visits to that quite competent little inn, I have been waited on by a slim, nervous, busy  woman who has spoken of her husband and his (proper) admiration for the works of SL....Now the husband himself is there; thin, spectacled, school-masterish, a young fifty. He practically grabs me; gabbles ""I was one of the first people to read your first novel -- not that I care a damn what you think -- I have just been out for twenty-six weeks with a circus as a mind reader -- here!"" He thrusts into my hands, now trembling with a fear of getting hypnotized, a blank sheet of his business stationery and a blank envelope.  On these he appears as PAUL PERRAULT, but in private (if any) life he is not less admirably named HAROLD FEATHERSTONE.      He speeds on, ""If I were to tell you about the inside of the phony medium game, I would give you a plot that would make you a best seller.....I'm in intimate touch with the FBI -- they come to me for all their dope about fortune-tellers who blackmail poor gels living in  apartments in Minneapolis -- janitor sorts their love letters out of their waste-basket and sells 'em to fake mediums -- the FBI are depending on me to show up the Ku Klux Klan, which is starting up again in Otter Tail County -- oh, I come back here because I was born here, but I get around everywhere --Minneapolis, Rochester, Iowa, Missouri, travel with my own mind-reading show in winter -- I meet everybody, Abbott Deutsch of the Benedictines at St. John's College -- bankers, manufacturers, with great big houses, all  brick, they come to me and say, ""Mr. Perrault, if I'd only come to you twenty years ago, my whole life would have been different, and I would know now which of my four children are legitimate. Lewis, I'll take you out this evening and introduce you to a lot of people you ought to meet here -- fine girl, used to be with the Russian ballet, got sick of travel; she's opened a photographic studio here, she's also a fine painter; decorated the studio herself; you'll see. She's just as good as Steichen....Wait, wait, here, I want  to show you -- you see these mimeographed books -- from the Nelson Enterprises Company of Columbus,