Letter from Sinclair Lewis to Marcella Powers, June 22, 1945

              fgd  SI N C LA I R      LEWIS  2601    EAST   SECOND    ST.  DULUTH   5,   MINNESOTA  Sunday June 22  The first thing, the all-important thing, isi  You must find out as soon as possible when, as  in September and on Just what day thereof, you  will have a weekorso vacation and the 2nd thing,  you must let me know a. s.a.p. when that will be.  All my plans depend on it.  I tried to telephone you last evening. With whom  and where were you gadding?  Here is news perhaps more for your mother than for  yous tell her lmmejita  The one thing in the Red  Room that Molly most adored, and that the average  females hereabouts have most admired, is the pert  and flamboyant crossed white net curtains. Very  fine for some female's bedroom, but for one of my  guest rooms, 1 have  Increasingly disliked them. So,  Just like drawing blood from Molly's warm Mick  heart, I am chucking them, and having modest figured  gray silk long draw drapes hung Instead — gray so  mi they will not quarrel with redrosy walls. And in  a couple of weeks, the net curtains will be neatly  packed by a furniture store here and shipped to  you.  Your mother and you can then decide which, if  either, gets part or all of them.  But this will break your hearts  !8m sure your  buddy Victor Rldder knows nothing of it, but a  man, in engraving and electrotyplng business, with  good plant, former owner of a Duluth paper but still  not over 50, is seriously plotting the starting of a  new newspaper here.  I have only one more Teachers College lecture, and  that just to some 30 or 40 students.  Those for  the- public had indecently grown in size from about  400 to, last week, about 700 «— most of them old  ladies who have read nothing since Ben Hur and who  consider me (as I wish to God you did) a Sweet Boy.  B\x$  mostly, this past week, I have been attending a  murder trial.  It is being held in Carlton, which you, better than  any one else, know to be the county seat of Carlton  County, 25 mllws from here. Mark Nolan is the Judge,  and I drive down there with him; the court room, the  jury, the deputy sheriffs, the prisoner and his  father and mother, have become my familiar home.