Get Free Shipping on orders over $0
Writers Like Us : My Life With Sinclair Lewis - Barnaby Conrad

Writers Like Us

My Life With Sinclair Lewis

By: Barnaby Conrad, Barnaby Conrad III (Editor)

Hardcover | 3 January 2025

At a Glance

Hardcover


$116.75

or 4 interest-free payments of $29.19 with

 or 

Ships in 5 to 10 business days

Writers Like Us is a poignant literary memoir by Barnaby Conrad, who had the good fortune to be mentored by Sinclair Lewis, the first American author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. In the spring of 1947, the 25 year-old Conrad was living in Santa Barbara, California, when he met Lewis. Conrad was struggling with his first novel, while Lewis, then 62, was in the twilight of his career. While they both had studied at Yale and had the same literary agent, they could not have been more different. A charming San Francisco-native, Conrad had been a dashing diplomat in Spain during World War II, an amateur bullfighter, a cocktail pianist, and a gifted portrait artist. Lewis was an awkward but strident genius from the Midwest, a sharp-tongued literary giant whose face had been ravaged by skin cancer. He had been married and divorced twice and was deeply lonely. Conrad was in awe of Lewis's global stature and charmed by his crusty humor and humanity. This odd couple instantly developed a camaraderie. Over a four-month period spent at Thorvale, a 700-acre estate in Williamstown, Massachusetts, Conrad worked as Lewis's personal secretary and mentored the young man's first novel-in-progress. Although Sinclair Lewis has fallen out of fashion, many writers agree that no one wrote more clearly about America than he. In Writers Like Us, Barnaby Conrad wrote a fascinating literary memoir of the intertwined lives of the two authors and the elusive nature of literary success.
Industry Reviews
"Barnaby Conrad's engaging and witty memoir, about his odd duties as secretary and companion to Sinclair Lewis, vividly captures the emotionally demanding and tormented life of the once-successful writer." --Jeffrey Meyers, author of Parallel Lives "Sinclair Lewis in his sunset years: indepensable biographical material and a joy to read!" --Richard Lingeman, author of Sinclair Lewis, Rebel from Main Street Before he went on to write his iconic bestselling novel, Matador, young Barnaby Conrad spent a memorable, at times harrowing, summer as secretary to America's first Nobel Literature laureate, Sinclair Lewis. Now Conrad's son and namesake has shaped his father's memoir into a riveting tale about what it was like to be mentored by this ultimately tragic figure who had been the dominant literary figure of his day. The result is a lively, fascinating, anecdote-rich account as well as a cautionary tale. --Christopher Buckley, author of Losing Mum and Pup

More in General Literary Studies

William Blake vs the World - John Higgs

RRP $22.99

$18.99

17%
OFF
Reading Greek : Text and Vocabulary : 2nd Edition - Joint Association of Classical Teachers

RRP $57.95

$51.75

11%
OFF
Introduction to Medieval Europe 300-1500 : 4th Edition - Wim Blockmans
Pride and Prejudice : Oxford World's Classics - Jane Austen

RRP $15.95

$12.75

20%
OFF
Book of Lives : A Memoir of Sorts - Margaret Atwood

RRP $69.99

$52.75

25%
OFF
Jane Austen in 50 Words - Maria Frawley
Reading Greek : Grammar and Exercises : 2nd Edition - Joint Association of Classical Teachers
Middlemarch : Collins Classics - George Eliot
Discourses and Selected Writings : Penguin Classics - Epictetus
The Odyssey : Oxford World's Classics - Homer

RRP $22.95

$19.75

14%
OFF
My Year of Reading Welshly : Discovering Wales in 52 Books - Alex Johnson
The Count of Monte Cristo : Cover design by Coralie Bickford-Smith - Alexandre Dumas
Ancient Greece 4ed : A Political, Social, and Cultural History - Sarah B. Pomeroy
The Voynich Manuscript - Raymond Clemens

RRP $82.95

$60.75

27%
OFF
War and Peace : Penguin Classics - Leo Tolstoy

RRP $19.99

$18.75

The Twelve Caesars : Penguin Classics - Suetonius

RRP $17.99

$16.75

The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective - Sara Lodge
Twelve Angry Men : Methuen Student Editions - Reginald Rose

RRP $29.99

$26.75

11%
OFF