Post to the Host
GK responds to queries on topics from childbearing to potato salad, with a little bookstore fetish in between.

Send your own post to the host.
Here's your chance to ask GK your most pressing questions—about the writing life, the radio life, Lake Wobegon, Guy Noir, whatever you like. Also, feel free to send feedback about the show. Honest comments and criticism are always welcome!

To the Host:

As a fan of Sinclair Lewis, I am constantly perplexed at how little acknowledgment he receives in his home state of Minnesota. I recently visited my grandson's fifth-grade class in Savage MN and saw a list of famous American authors on the wall. Sinclair Lewis was not on the list. I asked the teacher about this and she had no clue as to who I was talking about.

My wife and I have been listening to PHC for the last 25 years and have never heard Sinclair Lewis's name mentioned once, despite the fact that he was the first American to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.

His novel Elmer Gantry became a big movie. Babbitt and Main Street are quintessentially American expressions.

PHC makes a big deal of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Why is this? Is Sinclair Lewis not glamorous enough?

Ed Kornachuk
Mississauga, CA

Sinclair Lewis has been in eclipse since even before he died sixty years ago, Ed, for the simple reason that he is no longer widely read. His hometown of Sauk Centre, not far from Lake Wobegon, named a street for him and preserved his boyhood home and puts on an annual week-long celebration (July 10-15, 2011), but Sinclair Lewis Days ---- while it includes parades, a queen contest, turtle race, basketball tournament, and ice cream social ---- does not include much public discussion of his books for the simple reason that most people have never read them.

I read the three books you mention when I was in junior high school and liked them a lot, especially Babbitt. "Elmer Gantry" was the first picture I ever went to a movie theater to see; Burt Lancaster was great. But I haven't read anything of Lewis's since then. He was a satirist, Ed, and satire usually fades, and Lewis was not a great stylist, as Fitzgerald was. You put a paragraph of Fitzgerald or Hemingway or Faulkner in front of me, I'm likely to recognize it as their work; a paragraph of Lewis, no. You'd find it hard to parody Lewis, whereas any English major could write a few lines in the style of the Big Three.

I'm glad you love Lewis's work. He did good work and it deserves readers. But people read what they want to read and they don't turn to him. Tom Wolfe is a Lewis fan and maybe he'll write an appreciation of Lewis and start a revival. Meanwhile, the man's stock is low. Not far from where I live in St. Paul is a house that Lewis lived in for a time. Most people in thei neighborhood don't know that. If I were to organize a committee to turn the Sinclair Lewis House into a museum, it'd be awfully awfully hard to raise the cash.

As for the Nobel Prize, sir, it is not a reliable guide to literary immortality. Not so many people read Anatole France these days, nor Carl Friedrich Georg Spittele, nor Romain Rolland or Carl von Heidenstam,

Rudolph Eucken, Frederic Mistral, or Sully Prudhomme. Sic transit gloria mundi. How quickly passes the glory of the world. Thomas aKempis wrote that line and not many people read him anymore either. This is something that we old hack writers would prefer not to think about, Ed. Sorry you had to bring it up. All those books we worked on so hard, that in a few years will be dusty tomes in library sub-basements. Why? why? why? Because people like what they like and not what they don't. Simple as that.

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Hi Mr. Keillor,

I am a Washingtonian walking in the unfamiliar plains of Australia.

My host city is Melbourne, and Prairie Home Companion is the most consistent reminder of America that I have at the moment.

Recently I've been spending time in the magnificent Victoria State Library searching for jobs and listening to PHC on my headphones, and your show has given me a little island of home in this city where I am otherwise on my own.

This is my first big trip away from home. Any advice for a first-time traveler?
- Paul Gibbs
Bellevue, WA

You're a brave venturer, Paul, in the tradition of Erik the Red and Columbus and I salute you from snowy Minnesota. I hope that you're keeping a diary and recording all of your impressions and encounters, because these are days you will want to remember when you are old and cautious, like me. I couldn't fly off to Melbourne, Florida, alone and look for work, let alone the one in the southern hemisphere. So how can I advise you? Well, I'll just do it anyway. First advice is: don't be alone for too long. As you strike up conversations and meet people in your day to day life, try to trot quickly down the road to friendship. A friend is someone you can call when loneliness strikes. A lone pilgrim needs people he can call. Australians, preferably, but expats are good too. Enjoy your independence, an experience you may never have again in your life. Soon enough, you will likely become saddled with property and dependents and duties and deadlines, but for now you are quite magnificently free and unencumbered. Have fun. But do keep in touch with your friends and family back in Washington and don't make them worry more than they need to. I have an old American friend in New South Wales who left the U.S. forty years ago and loves it there. Hope you find what you're looking for, Paul.

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How come the house band is called The Shoe Band? Is there a story behind it?
-Mike Mooney, Albany, NY

At one time we had a sponsor, Guy's Shoes ("When you're talking shoes, you're talking Guy's"), the manufacturer of the Cash Shoe ("with the secret compartment in the sole") where you could stash your cash, and also the Emulator Shoe, the only shoes you can walk a mile in and experience the feelings of another person. In honor of Guy's, the band became the Guy's All-Star Shoe Band (or G.A.S. Band), which was shortened to Shoe Band, a four-man outfit these days with Richard Kriehn holding down the fifth chair on mando and fiddle and 2nd guitar when we can get him, and frequent guest Shoes. It's a hot band, at its best with rollicking country blues and stride but able to go in many directions, country and gospel, delicate accompaniment, Viennese cafe combo, R&B, opera pit, and, in the interest of comedy, able to be cheesy on cue.

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