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Adventures in Autobumming

by Sinclair Lewis

 


Adventures in Autobumming

 

Buy or preview the book on amazon.com

This book is not available outside the U.S. because of copyright limitations.

 


Rediscovered Literature

It is almost unheard of that a book-length work by an important author is not published in book form until almost a century after it was written, but that is exactly what has happened in this case.

This work by the classic American author Sinclair Lewis was published as a series of three articles in the Saturday Evening Post in December 1919 and January 1920. These articles are very difficult to find. We are proud to make this work generally available by being the first to publish it as a book.

This is an unusual book for Sinclair Lewis, because it is written with a style of humor that we don’t see in his other books.

It is the story of his travels around America in his Model T Ford. He sums up his wanderings when he says:

“I remember Southern ferries where you help the ferryman to pole your way across the yellow stream; Western fords where you splash through a torrent and instantly shoot up a mountain rise; Tennessee cabins as aboriginal as in the days of Dan’l Boone; St. Ignatius, that Alpine town with unmistakably Italian convent and mission tower, which nevertheless is in Montana; old Rockbridge Alum Springs, where once the flower of Virginia and the Carolinas rode and danced and made love; young Mennonites in Pennsylvania with silky chin whiskers, grotesque under their pink cheeks; a Shaker settlement of vast barns in a valley between Albany and Pittsfield; a road between Bemidji and Duluth through pines impressive as columns of an Egyptian temple, broken only by infrequent clearings where Indians looked up from cultivating corn to hold up a stolid arm in greeting; cowpunchers riding range in Oregon—in chaps even to-day; the climb up out of Pittsburgh like crawling up the side of a smoking caldron.”

Sinclair Lewis is the author of such classic works as Main Street, Babbit, Elmer Gantry and It Can’t Happen Here. He was the first American writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature. This work was written when he was at the height of his powers, and it appeared just before Main Street.