Letter from Sinclair Lewis to Marcella Powers, June 22, 1944

              /&'  Thursday, June 22 and who do you  think gets here a month from tomorrow &  does a great conjuring act of transforming Duluth into Mahomet's dream of paradise, I ask you —  Dear Comrades  graphy  Aside from the fact that the above is unique in typo-  Comrade Jesus but have I been working! Planning and planning -  I'll be glad when the novel consents to let Itself get started.  Yet itss all fun, all satisfaction — a feeling of something  neat and solid built — just the opposite to my feeling of waste  and frippery in Hollywood a year ago.,..I have invented and  ingeniously named 151 (literally) characters; I even know all  their ages and stationslnlife....Now to use them, or any of them,  In a gaily tripping story — oh, we'll take up that detail next  week....No, you're wrong, you damn magazlneditor, that IS the  way to write a big novel. I predict that this will be better  even than my ""Main Street,"" my ""Brothers Karamazov"" or even my  ""Winnie the Poorltan, a Marxian Fable of Excess Values.""  I've again spent a day in court — this time in the village of  Carlton, among the pines and birches, with another judge of  this district, Judge Kenny, as slender and diffident and genfcle  as Mark Nolan is big and booming — and both probably about  equally sound judges.....Mark, by the way, max &e chosen to the  vacant Federal judgeship of this district.  I've been urgently invited by a couple of different interests  to go to Chicago next week and boost for Harold Stassen for the  Republican candidacy. They'd even have room for me. Nope. I8d  rather, firs t place, stay here and view the wonders of the  Head o' the Lakes (our cream is supervitaminized) and second,  while I'd prefer Harold to Dewey or Bricker, I prefer our good  ole socialist comrade, FDR, to Harold.  It's been cold and warm and brilliant and gray and I feel  fine and am endlessly happy in the thought of your coming,  my dear.  Voltaire the XVII  Oh yes, good idea for you to write to Willa Cather — remind her of our dinner and your riding home with her. Her  address is 570 Park Avenue — Regent 4-8354.  he seems to be working now, but his home  Tom's address .  address is!  Tom Kume  c/o Kita, 24 East 125th Street, NYC  and curiously enough, my letter to him there actually reached  him!  — love — love —