Writers Like Us

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.