Letter from Sinclair Lewis to Marcella Powers, August 20, 1943

              CHHTEiKI mHRffiOriT  8221  SUNSET BOULEVARD  HOLLYWOOD, LOS ANGELES , CALIFORNIA  Friday afternoon, August 20  Two weeks from tomorrow I start for New York....As there  will not be so many more letters to you this time, I think  I may let this letter run on a bit, instead of my usual:  Dear Wife:  Just a hasty note to let you know all goes well working  very hard worked today frm 10 AM to 1 PM other days almost as  hard but feel pretty good weather pretty good room here  at Chateau Varmint pretty good hope you are taking care  yrself my love to Eagle, Montgomery, and Pill,  Yr loving Harry.  The mink coat complex is curious. I know you've always  thought well of jema? having one, and suddenly I so much want  you to — put of the most perverse, selfish, almost mystic  reasons, as thus: Much though I like a lot of people here,  I hate the work — for me, it seems so sterile, so childish.  It has been rather hard to stick on, week after week. I  have had to make myself; I have counted days like a child  awaiting Christmas — or like a prisoner — till I should  see you again. It's been much harder than sticking on in  Minneapolis, last fall, despite all the so-much-more glittery people here, because there I felt, both in writing Gideon and in teaching, that I was doing something valid,. not  just whoring.....without too richly satisfying the customers.  So, just because it hasr heen  hard I want, so that it will  not have seemed altogether futile, to have some compensatory  trophy of it that will last three or four years or maybe  more, and as I would so very much MMMM rather see something  on or about you than on any. table or desk — or shoulders'. —  of my own, I covet this fur coat (not inevitably mink', that  choice is up to the great decorator, M. Povah) that I can earn  In two or three or four weeks o4r drivel here, even after  paying all taxes and expenses out of the total loot.  Poor dearest darling, you will have to trot up to Big IT  at all hours of the day and night, to exhibit the coat of  mink, sable, Alaskan field-mouse or blotting paper that will  thus be my sole monument of a Journey into the Valley of  Ashes.  No, that's not quite true. I d0 have other monuments: your  qdorable-letters, so much more rare and spirited and gay and""  impressive than any with which you have ever blessed me before, and some excellent notes for the lecture-trmp to come,