About the author: Martin Bucco is a professor of English at Colorado State University. He received his BA from Highlands University, his MA from Columbia University, and his PhD from the University of Missouri. In addition to many essays and reviews, he has written numerous critical biographies. Among them Frank Waters, Wilbur Daniel Steele, E. W. Howe, and René Wellek. He also is the author of a volume of poetry, The Voluntary Tongue; the survey Western American Literary Criticism; the study Main Street: The Revolt of Carol Kennicott; and he has edited Critical Essays on Sinclair Lewis.
2004 0-7734-6482-4 This study provides readers with a comprehensive view of novelist Sinclair Lewis as an avid reader and literary critic. The colorful allusions and satiric pronouncements of America’s first winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature on books and writers prompted many readers during the first half of the 20th century to take up more and better reading. The study offers a biographical overview of the literary Lewis; insights into the novelist’s ideas on and images of readers and reading; details of Lewis’s sweeping references to everyone from Homer to Norman Mailer; discussion of the author’s reflections on the problems of writers and writing; and, finally, clarity on Lewis’s attitudes toward literary critics and literary criticism – not excluding the novelist’s conclusions about his own criticism and role as literary reviewer. In addition to a general index, the book includes a character index.