Lingeman, Richard R(oberts) 1931-

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LINGEMAN, Richard R(oberts) 1931-

(Niles Chignon; William Randolph Hirsch, a joint pseudonym)

PERSONAL: Born January 2, 1931, in Crawfordsville, IN; son of Byron Newton and Vera (Spencer) Lingeman; married Anthea Nicholson (a graphic designer), April 3, 1965; children: Jennifer Kate. Education: Haverford College, B.A., 1953; also studied law at Yale University and did graduate work at Columbia University.

ADDRESSES: Office—Nation, 33 Irving Plaza., New York, NY 10003-2332.

CAREER: Monocle (magazine), New York, NY, cofounder and executive editor, beginning 1962; New York Times Book Review, New York, NY, associate editor and columnist, 1969-78; Nation, New York, NY, executive editor, 1978-95, senior editor, 1995—. Public relations consultant to Peace Corps. Military service: U.S. Army, 1953-56.

MEMBER: Authors Guild, Society of American Historians, New York Historical Society.

AWARDS, HONORS: Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey, 1908-1945 named Chicago Sun-Times Book of the Year.

WRITINGS:

(Editor, with Victor Navasky) The Monocle Peep Show, Bantam (New York, NY), 1965.

(Under pseudonym Niles Chignon) The Camp Follower's Guide, Avon (New York, NY), 1965.

(With Marvin Kitman, under joint pseudonym William Randolph Hirsch) The Red Chinese Air Force Diet, Exercise, and Sex Book, Stein & Day (New York, NY), 1967.

Drugs from A to Z, McGraw-Hill (New York, NY), 1969, revised edition, 1974.

Don't You Know There's a War On: The American Home Front, 1941-45, Putnam (New York, NY), 1970.

Small Town America: A Narrative History, 1620-the Present, Putnam (New York, NY), 1980.

Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City, 1871-1907, Wiley (New York, NY), 1987.

Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey, 1908-1945, Wiley (New York, NY), 1990.

Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street, Random House (New York, NY), 2002.

(Editor) Sinclair Lewis, Sinclair Lewis: Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, Dodsworth, Library of America (New York, NY), 2002.

Contributor to periodicals, including New York Times Book Review, Der Spiegel, Esquire, Playboy, World, Nation, and New Republic. Editor, Outsider's Newsletter; member of editorial board, Dreiser Studies.

SIDELIGHTS: "In American folklore," wrote Stephen Darst in Commonweal, "the small town is either Eden or Zenith and one of the considerable accomplishments of Richard Lingeman's [Small Town America: A Narrative History, 1620-the Present] is that his portrait is balanced, whole and unburdened by either hostility or sentimentality in its pursuit of the reality behind the twin myths." Lingeman's book is both a comprehensive survey and a critical analysis of American small-town life. According to John Leonard of the New York Times, the work is "grand social history. It sweeps to generalization and stoops to anecdote. It is full of idealism and flimflam, corn and greed, sod and technology. It takes us from the usual New England theocracy of white churches and green commons to the frontier outposts of the Northwest territories of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois; from the homesteads and prairie junctions of the Great Plains to the mining camps of California and Colorado; from the plantation to the mill town to the trading post to the company store to the tourist trap. Small, it tells us, has seldom been beautiful, although it always wanted to be."

In reviewing Small Town America, some critics made special mention of the author's extensive research. Nicholas Lemann suggested that perhaps Lingeman has incorporated too much of what he learned into his book. Lemann wrote in the New Republic that the author "has read virtually every word ever written by a sociologist, historian, novelist, or poet on the subject [of small-town life], and done a solid job of putting it all together. The only drawback to his research is that its total reliance on secondary sources makes him a prisoner of what's in the library; when there's a Babbitt or a Middletown to draw from the book works, and when there isn't it gets bogged down in a mass of the small details of social history, such as the contents of shelves in frontier stores." New York Times Book Review critic Evan Connell found the author has done his research "so conscientiously and thoroughly that nobody else will attempt a similar book. Whatever you might conceivably want to know about American small towns is here; . . . everything you might care about is here. Everything and considerably more. The magnitude of Mr. Lingeman's research is not just impressive, it is appalling. The bibliography lists some 300 sources."

Some critics questioned whether all this detail led to an overall understanding of Lingeman's subject. Michael Zuckerman, in a Nation article, felt that "for all the pages he devotes to all these aspects of the past, Lingeman never allows his history to intrude importantly on his conceptions of those little communities. His concern is with the residues of the towns in the American mind, not with their realities on the ground. From his first sentence, he deals in 'memory' more than in anything substantial. To his last line, he dwells on 'dreams' more than on anything mundane." Small Town America "fairly bursts with interesting material," noted Washington Post Book World reviewer Noel Perrin, "but if you really want to understand American small towns, you would do better to read something like Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, which captures the western-open form, or James Gould Cozzens's novel By Love Possessed, which captures the eastern-inward variety. This book documents and describes, but it never captures anything."

Reviewers Robert R. Harris and Walter Clemons, however, found more to praise in the book. According to Harris's Village Voice article, "Interspersed throughout and concentrated in two chapters is, in effect, another book, an absorbing and authoritative examination of the creative writers who blew the whistle on small-town hypocrisy—e.g., Sinclair Lewis (Main Street), Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg, Ohio), Edgar Lee Masters (Spoon River Anthology). It is in these sections that Lingeman seems most at home, and where his analysis is most penetrating. It could be argued that he should have written just this second book of literary commentary; he has enough material. But he has seen (rightly, I think) that careful consideration of these novels and poems needs the underpinning history he supplies. He wisely views these creative works as social history." And Clemons, writing about Small Town America in Newsweek, stated that Lingeman's "most original stroke is his broadening investigation into areas we don't usually consider part of this story. He has a witty chapter on the opening of the Northwest Territory after the American Revolution, when solid towns like Marietta, Ohio—named after Marie Antoinette, considered a patroness of the American cause—sprang up alongside doomed, speculative bubbles like Gallipolis, populated by an untried band of French 'small craftsmen—jewelers, wigmakers, woodcarvers, coachmakers, gilders.'" Clemons concluded that Small Town America is a "finely detailed, first-rate social history."

Lingeman is a product of small-town Terre Haute, Indiana. Another notable Terre Haute native—novelist Theodore Dreiser—became the subject of a two-volume biography. Volume one, Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City, 1871-1907, explores the youth and career beginnings of Dreiser, who caused a scandal in the 1900s with the publication of Sister Carrie. The novelist came from German stock; his immigrant father worked in dry goods and maintained a strictly Catholic family. Dreiser's mother, Sarah, "was a Mennonite of German ancestry who became a Catholic at her husband's directive," noted New Republic reviewer Alfred Kazin. "But (a point nobody before Lingeman has argued) her own sensuousness made her almost too sympathetic to her notoriously wayward daughters." Theodore Dreiser began his career in the newspaper world of 1880s Chicago, a far cry from Terre Haute. "Reporting was the great school then for aspiring novelists," Kazin pointed out, and Dreiser took in the urban atmosphere of Chicago, New York, Pittsburgh, and other large cities. Kazin went on to praise Lingeman for "[catching] Dreiser's doubleness—the suffering submissiveness of his early years in 'the furnace of American capitalism,' his amazing gift for summoning up from below, almost without his will the tidal surge and disaster recurrent in American society."

In volume two, Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey, 1908-1945, Lingeman takes up Dreiser at middle age, "not yet rich or famous but a survivor in a world he had come to perceive as a jungle in which the strong and cunning preyed on the weak," as New Republic's Daniel Aaron put it. Sister Carrie had been published reluctantly by an editor who feared scandal, and Dreiser's seminal work, An American Tragedy, was still years away. "Now," wrote Aaron, "the chronicle picks up speed. Lingeman must cover so much ground, must deal with so many of Dreiser's publishing imbroglios, sexual encounters, trips and travels, political involvement, widening friendships, and metaphysical vagaries that little space remains to pause and reflect." Still, Aaron added, Lingeman "is a trustworthy guide through Dreiser country. . . . He has written the fullest and best informed biography of Dreiser to date and put the untidy life of an unendearing man into perspective without making him any better or worse than he was." Lingeman's "is an undeluded, jargon-free biography," commented Genevieve Stuttaford in Publishers Weekly, "which finds much to admire in both the man and his work."

Lingeman explored another American novelist of the early twentieth century with Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street. The author of Babbitt, Main Street, and Elmer Gantry grew up in Sauk Centre, Minnesota; he subsequently joined the intellectual set in New York and made a career of skewering small-town American manners and mores. Lewis had, wrote a Kirkus Reviews contributor, an "uncanny mimicry of slang, in-depth research into professions and communities, and iconoclastic treatment of business, science, fundamentalism, and marriage." The novelist became the object of controversy for his satiric takes on the American way of life; Lewis was once castigated in print by Archibald MacLeish as among those writers who "[devote] themselves to negativity, thus placing America in spiritual peril," as a Nation contributor quoted. But Lewis saw himself as more than a satirist: Those who "love their country," he countered, as quoted in Lingeman's book, and are "willing to report its transient dangers and stupidities, have been as valuable an influence as America has ever known."

A contemporary of Dreiser as well as Ernest Hemingway and Edith Wharton, it was Lewis who became America's first Nobel Prize laureate in literature, a fact made all the more significant by the fact that reviewers of his day often had dismissed the novelist as a lightweight. Lingeman's biography "sets the record straight" on the author who had been the subject of a more "damning" work by Mark Scherer, according to onetime Lewis secretary Barnaby Conrad. Scherer's 1963 Sinclair Lewis: An American Life had focused on him as "an unlikable alcoholic who somehow contrived to produce Main Street and Elmer Gantry in between benders," as National Review writer Terry Teachout noted. Conversely, said Conrad in the Wilson Quarterly, the Lingeman version "provides a far more empathic picture of the talented, tortured, and ultimately tragic" novelist. Henry Carrigan of Library Journal found the book falling prey to "the trap of many literary biographies by reporting minor details," but summed up Lingeman's Sinclair Lewis as "an affectionate and engaging portrait of one of our most important novelists."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Lingeman, Richard, Small Town America: A Narrative History, 1620-the Present, Putnam (New York, NY), 1980.

Lingeman, Richard, Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street, Random House (New York, NY), 2002.

PERIODICALS

American Literature, September, 1991, Jack Wallace, review of Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey, 1908-1945, p. 555.

American Scholar, winter, 1988, Thomas Riggio, review of Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City, 1871-1907, p. 151.

Atlantic Monthly, August, 1993, review of Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey, 1908-1945, p. 98.

Best Sellers, January, 1987, review of Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City, 1871-1907, p. 385.

Booklist, September 1, 1986, review of Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City, 1871-1907, p. 20; September 15, 1990, review of Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey, 1908-1945, p. 134; December 15, 2001, Donna Seaman, review of Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street, p. 699.

Choice, January, 1987, review of Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City, 1871-1907, p. 762.

Commonweal, October 9, 1981, Stephen Darst, review of Small Town America.

Economist, February 2, 2002, review of Sinclair Lewis, p. 88.

English Studies, August, 1989, Edward Margolies, review of Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City, 1871-1907, p. 372.

Guardian, November 25, 1990, review of Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey, 1908-1945, p. 20.

Hudson Review, spring, 2003, Brooke Allen, review of Sinclair Lewis, pp. 191-200.

Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 1986, review of Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City, 1871-1907, p. 1273; August 1, 1990, review of Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey, 1908-1945, p. 1064; November 15, 2001, review of Sinclair Lewis, p. 1597.

Library Journal, August, 1990, Charles Nash, review of Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey, 1908-1945, p. 111; January, 2002, Henry Carrigan, review of Sinclair Lewis, p. 102.

Modern Fiction Studies, summer, 1988, review of Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City, 1871-1907, p. 235.

Nation, August 30-September 6, 1980, Michael Zuckerman, review of Small Town America; December 27, 1986, review of Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City, 1871-1907, p. 738; March 4, 2002, "Sauk Centre's Finest," p. 37.

National Review, April 10, 1987, review of Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City, 1871-1907, p. 50; March 11, 2002, Terry Teachout, "Silly Babbitt," p. 51.

New Republic, August 30, 1980, Nicholas Lemann, review of Small Town America; February 23, 1987, Alfred Kazin, review of Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City, 1871-1907, p. 31; November 12, 1990, Daniel Aaron, review of Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey, 1908-1945, p. 34.

Newsweek, July 28, 1980, Walter Clemons, review of Small Town America.

New Yorker, January 14, 1991, John Updike, review of Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey, 1908-1945, p. 89; February 4, 2002, John Updike, "No Brakes: A New Biography of Sinclair Lewis," p. 77.

New York Review of Books, June 27, 2002, Elizabeth Hardwick, review of Sinclair Lewis, p. 42.

New York Times, June 13, 1980, John Leonard, review of Small Town America; October 14, 1987, review of Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City, 1871-1907, p. 27; October 10, 1990, review of Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey, 1908-1945, p. C20.

New York Times Book Review, July 6, 1980, Evan Connell, review of Small Town America.

Publishers Weekly, August 29, 1986, Genevieve Stuttaford, review of Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City, 1871-1907, p. 380; August 3, 1990, Genevieve Stuttaford, review of Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey, 1908-1945, p. 70; December 10, 2001, review of Sinclair Lewis, p. 60.

Saturday Night, January-February, 1991, Douglas Fetherling, review of Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey, 1908-1945, p. 51.

Sewanee Review, summer, 1988, Joseph Davis, review of Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City, 1871-1907, p. 507.

Smithsonian, May, 1987, Gerald Weales, review of Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City, 1871-1907, p. 178.

Times Literary Supplement, December 13, 2002, Michael Greenberg, review of Sinclair Lewis, p. 6.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), September 28, 1986, review of Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City, 1871-1907, p. 7; July 11, 1993, review of Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey, 1908-1945, p. 2.

USA Today, December 2, 1986, review of Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City, 1871-1907, p. 7D.

Village Voice, September 17-23, 1980, Robert R. Harris, review of Small Town America.

Virginia Quarterly Review, spring, 1988, Arthur Casciato, review of Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City, 1871-1907, p. 336.

Washington Post Book World, June 13, 1980, Noel Perrin, review of Small Town America; September 28, 1986, review of Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City, 1871-1907, p. 3; September 30, 1990, review of Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey, 1908-1945, p. 3.

Wilson Quarterly, spring, 2002, Barnaby Conrad, review of Sinclair Lewis, p. 114.

World Literature Today, winter, 1992, Daniel King, review of Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey, 1908-1945, p. 137.