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’s, 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 and Videos 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.
You can visit the conference archive and watch the session videos.
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.
During the COVID pandemic, the Society began to offer virtual meetings over Zoom. This page archives videos of those virtual presentations as well as other online presentations of interest to our members.
Sauk Centre
The Sinclair Lewis Society often visits Sauk Centre, Minnesota, for conferences and the annual Sinclair Lewis Days, usually in mid-July. Below are some photographs taken in Sauk Centre.
Sinclair Lewis Conference participants at the Sinclair Lewis Boyhood Home, July 2017 
Participants at the 2017 Sinclair Lewis Conference at Sinclair Lewis’s grave in Sauk Centre. 
Members of the Sinclair Lewis Society visit Lewis’s grave during a 1997 conference. Standing, from left to right: From left to right: Layne Moore, Christina Schulz, Robert McLaughlin, and George Killough. 
Conference goers visit the Sinclair Lewis Boyhood Home in 1997. From left to right: James Hutchisson, Mark Dupree, M. Ellen Dupree, Edith Bucco, Martin Bucco, Sally Parry, Joyce Lyng, and Robert McLaughlin. 
Sinclair Lewis in Sauk Centre, circa 1948 
Members of the Sinclair Lewis Society visit Lewis’s grave during a 1997 conference. 
Liyan Yu, Rebecca Cooper, Edie Bucco, M. Ellen Dupree, Nancy L. Bunge, Sally Parry, Christina Schulz, Fred Betz, and Layne Moore visit Greenwood Cemetery during the 2000 Lewis Conference 
Participants in the Sinclair Lewis Conference 2000 on the steps of the Sinclair Lewis Boyhood Home. 
Members of the Sinclair Lewis Society visit Lewis’s grave during a 1997 conference.