April 7, 1931
Letter from Sinclair Lewis to Clarence Darrow
Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951), a native of Sauk Center, Minnesota, and one of the important novelists of the 20th century, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930.
In the letter, several references are notable. Burris Jenkins was a Kansas City minister who Lewis interviewed and observed in preparation for writing his novel Elmer Gantry (1926). The assassination reference is to the attempt on Benito Mussolini by Violet Gibson, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat. She shot at Mussolini three times in Rome on April 7, 1926, but only slightly wounded him. Gibson was imprisoned and later interned in an English asylum.
The Detroit trial refers to the Sweet murder trials, in which Darrow secured an acquittal for Ossian Sweet. Sweet, an African-American physician, and his friends and his family were charged with murder for the shooting death of a man as they defended themselves against a violent white mob at their house. Walter White was Assistant Secretary of the NAACP who gathered information about the case, leading to Charles H. Mahoney and Clarence Darrow joining as counsel.
