Letter from Sinclair Lewis to Marcella Powers, June 1, 1944

              you know perfickly [sic]well it's 2601E2ndstreetduluth 5 stloulsecountyminnesota  Thursday JUNE 1, 1944  and it is NOT a fine rosy chiming June 1st  either but foggy and quiet and swell for work  wait till July for fine weather, if you can  wait, my chirrup  June the first    I am enclosing some [""carbon copies"" is typed above] pages of my Minnesota Diary which you  may want just to glance through -- it's not meant to be at  all personal, but just a record of weather and the like --  you know, just as if I were a fussy author that, he dunno why, keeps careful track of unimportant things ----    This is really a gorgeous house. When you walk on the terrace and look down at the lake, then turn and look up at the Tudor fascade of the house, with limestone edged bay-windows like a very small Oxford college, you will be impressed; and when you walk on lawn and in garden, you will yelp with distress that it hasn't been better kept up.    It's amazing how much happier I am here than in Hollywood, a year ago, with all its Kate Hepburns and Cedric Hardwickes and Romanoff Restaurants.  It's because, really working on the novel, I feel justified, tinily triumphant, in life; out there, doing the piffling work on the childish scenario, I felt guilty and irritably bored.    I'm just getting acquainted with an amusing variety of people -- the variety that I always kicked about lacking in NY (and that Connie so handsomely corrected by those many doctors he always almost brought around)? John Malick, the extremely intelligent Unitarian minister and his really attractive quiet wife, both from Cambridge (the Unitarians, you ignorant papist, are the leftwing among Protestants); Judge Mark Nolan, district judge, a big cheerful Mick from the Iron Range -- I go often to his court; young Bob Ridder & wife from NY; old Mr. Crassweller of the 77 yrs of chess; Richard Singer,  a very handsome 25-year-old Rabbi from the great Hebrew Union Theological School of Cincinnatti [sic]i; Ray and Kitty Sicard -- he the intense nervous city editor of the Herald here; Kenneth Cant, real estate, full of bluff but most likeable; Elsa Anneke, widow who plays piano and chums with the Finnish conductor of the Duluth Symphony Orchestra -- whom I'm to meet at her house tomorrow night -- he's supposed to be good, and his name is spelled either Hainikainen  or  Hainnikkainnenn on, as above, Cincinatti [sic] or Cinncinnati [sic] or possibly Jones.    Did I, in haste of Mpls-Winona-Mpls-Duluth, tell you the one high spot of luxury in handsome millionaire country house on Mississippi (or Hainenkainen) bluffs -- sofa pillows covered with MINK?  I must have....I told this to Dorothy Lewis and Mary Baxter as the height of acme of capitalistic horror and they looked dreamily at each other and breathed, ""My, what a wonnerful [sic] ideal!""    Women, thy name is -- women; and unless I hear from you soon,  I shall call your tribe something even worse.