HARRY SINCLAIR LEWIS COLLECTION - YEARBOOK SIGNED WITH SIGNED CORRESPONDENCE HARRY SINCLAIR LEWIS Literature

HARRY SINCLAIR LEWIS COLLECTION. This collection consists of a Yale University yearbook (1907) and signed letters primarily from Harry Sinclair Lewis to college friend Elias Robert Stevenson. Stevenson and Lewis were close friends at Yale and maintained contact throughout their lives. Stevenson became a newspaperman and spent most of his career as an editor at the Republican-American in Waterbury, Connecticut. He was the model for the newspaper-editor-protagonist Doremus Jessup in Lewis' It Can't Happen Here. Lewis visited Stevenson and toured the brass factories in Waterbury while doing research for a labor novel he never completed. During one of those visits Lewis signed Stevenson's yearbook using his first name, "Harry." This use of his first name in his signature is highly unusual; Lewis stopped using his first name in college. His college diaries (Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library) reflect the change from his earliest diary in 1903, signed Harry S. Lewis, to his final diary in 1907 that he signed Sinclair Lewis. Included in this collection is Stevenson's college yearbook and a group of eight letters from Lewis (and others) to E. Robert Stevenson (ERS). A related article based on this collection, which illuminates the friendship of Harry and Elias, is included. (Dooling, Michael Carroll, On a First Name Basis, Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter, Fall 2005.) LIST OF ITEMS: HISTORY OF THE CLASS OF 1907. New Haven: Yale University, 1907. 8vo, blue cloth, re-backed with original spine laid over, 450 pp., very good condition. Signed by nearly every member of the class of 1907. FEBRUARY 6, 1931 TLS from Lewis to ERS re: Billy Sunday & Cornelius Vanderbilt "roast." JUNE 4, 1936 ALS from Lewis to ERS re: motoring to Waterbury, "not for publication." JULY 28, 1936 ALS from Lewis to ERS re: "Greetings to you and the family." FEBRUARY 17, 1937 TLS from Lewis to ERS regarding Supreme Court legislation; penned note at bottom refers to Dorothy Thompson's column in the Herald Tribune. JUNE 11, 1937 TLS from Lewis to ERS re: not attending the Yale reunion. JULY12, 1951 TLS from Ethel Fairmont Beebe to ERS re: Harrison Smith research (Smith was the author of From Main Street to Stockholm: Letters of Sinclair Lewis 1919 -1930, published in 1952). AUGUST 17, 1954 TLS from Lewis' biographer Mark Schorer to ERS re: information about Sinclair Lewis, specifically relating to sociological data on Waterbury he may have provided to Lewis for his labor novel. JULY 3, (no year) TLS from Lewis' second wife, journalist Dorothy Thompson, to ERS regarding an editorial.