The Sinclair Lewis Society held a virtual conference July 14-15, 2022 to celebrate the 102nd anniversary of the publication of Main Street and 100th anniversary of the publication of Babbitt. The keynote speaker was James Gambone, co-director and producer of The Life and Loves of Sinclair Lewis who spoke from the newly refurbished Sinclair Lewis Boyhood Home, courtesy of the Sinclair Lewis Foundation. His talk was preceded by a virtual tour of the refurbished Boyhood Home, courtesy of Jim Umhoefer, president of the Sinclair Lewis Foundation.
There were three panels on Sinclair Lewis’s works, with a focus on Babbitt and Main Street. In addition, Isabel Marín Gómez, from the University of Murcia in Spain, spoke on the publication history of Babbitt in Spain and its connections to Spain’s political and social history. All the proceedings were recorded. Go to the Presentations page to access recordings of the conference events. Contact Sally Parry at separry@ilstu.edu if you need a transcript of any session. The six presentations focusing on Babbitt will be in a special issue of Midwestern Miscellany, to be published in late 2022.
The next conference sponsored by the Sinclair Lewis Society will be in July 2025 in Sauk Centre, Minnesota and will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the publication of Arrowsmith and Lewis’s winning of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Edcel Cintron Gonzalez, a graduate student at Illinois State University, for his technical support for the conference as well as his help with the translation of the question and answer session after Isabel Marín Gómez’s presentation; Jim Kalmbach, Professor Emeritus at Illinois State University, for his work on the Sinclair Lewis Society website https://english.illinoisstate.edu/; Steve Halle, Director of the Publications Unit at Illinois State University; Grace Fuller, an intern at the Publications Unit, for the Main Street and Babbitt logo; Holms Troelstrup, Assistant Director of the Publications Unit, for her work on the conference for the Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter; Roberto Cantu, Professor Emeritus of Chicano Studies, and jointly Professor Emeritus of English at California State University, Los Angeles, for his translation work; Robert L. McLaughlin for his work on the conference; Barbara Goldstein for her reading of Isabel Marín Gómez’s paper; William Barillas of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature for the Babbitt graphic; Marcia Noe, also of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature and editor of MidAmerica and Midwestern Miscellany, for helping to publicize the conference.
