Richard Lingeman

I'm from Crawfordsville, Indiana, born in a brick house right across the street from the study of Gen. Lew Wallace, author of Ben Hur. Growing up in a Midwestern town would later inspire me to seek to understand the role of the small town in American history and the life of Sinclair Lewis, author of two catalytic novels, Main Street and Babbitt. As Lewis said about his own home town, it was a good start in life.

After graduating from high school, I followed Lewis east, attending Haverford College, an academically rigorous school near Philadelphia where I majored in sociology and minored in American Lit. My senior paper was a biographical study of Lewis. Graduating in 1953, I was caught in the tail end of the Korean War. (This period would be an indirect inspiration for my current project, a history of America between 1945 and 1950, exploring the fate of liberal idealism between victory and Cold War.) I enlisted in the Army Counter-Intelligence Corps and found myself plunked in an appalling hotbed of mccarthyism. By luck of the draw, I ended up in Japan, semi-undercover and spying on ultra-nationalist groups.

Discharged in 1956, I entered Yale Law School—but decamped after a year sadly persuaded that I was not legal material. While at Yale, as a diversion from studying tax law, I started writing parodies and pasquinades for Monocle, a self-styled leisurely quarterly of political satire founded by law and graduate students, which appeared twice a year. Editor and fellow law student Victor Navasky recruited me to write for it. In 1960 we regrouped in New York where Navasky had raised startup money for regular publication. As executive editor I wrote for and edited the magazine, which appeared quarterly, and a satiric weekly called “The Outsider’s Newsletter.” Thus, as a law school dropout I began my career as an editor and writer.

Monocle, America’s only magazine of political satire, eventually succumbed to cash-flow problems. To pay the rent, its editors formed a book-packaging company. To pay my rent I free-lanced for the New York Times Magazine and Book Review and a number of other publications. I also co-authored or edited several books of humor, including a Monocle anthology and satires on “camp” and diet and health books. I wrote two books: Drugs from A to Z, a dictionary of slang and illicit substances published by McGraw-Hill, and Don't You Know There’s A War On?, a social history of the American home front during World War II, published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons. It sold fairly well and was an alternate selection of the Literary Guild. In 2003 a new edition was published by Nation Books.

In 1969 I joined the staff of the Times Book Review, remaining there for nine years. During this stint I previewed and assigned books for reviews, wrote a weekly column of publishing news called “Book Ends” and moonlighted as a substitute daily reviewer. During those years I researched and completed my third book, Small Town America, a narrative of the role of the small town in American history, which was published by Putnam’s in 1980. It received a cover review in The New York Times Book Review and was nominated for an American Book Award.

By then I had left the Times to become executive editor of The Nation, America’s oldest political weekly, holding down this post from 1978 to 1996 when I became a senior editor. I have written many articles, editorials, book reviews and satires for the magazine. My current book project, is to be published by Nation Books under the tentative title “The Noir Forties: American Life and Culture 1945-1950.”

After Small Town America appeared, I launched myself into a major biography of Theodore Dreiser, an undertaking which, along with my job. would occupy the next ten years of my life. The biography appeared in two volumes, in 1986 and 1990. Volume II of the hardcover edition won a Chicago Sun-Times Book of the Year Award in 1990. John Wiley brought out an abridged paperback version, Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey 1871-1945, in 1993. In 2002 Random House published the biography I had been waiting many years to write, Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street,. It was followed by Double Lives: American Writers’ Friendships in 2005 (Random House) and The Nation Guide to the Nation in 2009 (Vintage), an activist's guide to the history and contemporary culture of the American left.

In summer 1999 the Berkshire Theater Festival produced Starr's Last Tape. by Victor Navasky and me, a one-character play satirizing the Monica Lewinsky affair. Earlier in my career, I had dabbled in comedy writing, creating material for Al Bernie, Alan King and the BBC's That Was the Week That Was. I have also contributed straight and satiric articles to Vanity Fair, Playboy, Esquire and other periodicals.

I have served on the board of P.E.N., and the council of the Authors Guild. I joined the National Book Critics Circle at its inception. I am also a member of the Society of American Historians. Following the appearance of Small Town America, I spoke at several symposiums on small town problems and became a member of the board of the Small Town Institute (now defunct). In 1988 I was an American Participant for the U.S. Information Agency, lecturing on small town America and The Nation in five European countries. I have also made a number of speeches on Theodore Dreiser at colleges and libraries in the United States. I served on the non-fiction and biography juries for the Pulitzer Prize and the jury for the Parkinson Prize for the Society of American Historians. I was awarded a 1997 Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Humanities to complete a biography of Sinclair Lewis. I am on the editorial board of American Literary Naturalism, successor to Dreiser Studies.