The Trail of the Hawk

The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life is a 1915 novel by Sinclair Lewis. The story follows the life of Carl Ericson as he grows up and matures. He has to face the choice of either going to his town college, to a private school with a childhood friend, or live in the wilderness with his older friend, who had a cottage in the middle of the forest. (wikipedia.org) About the author: Harry Sinclair Lewis (February 7, 1885 - January 10, 1951) was an American writer and playwright. In 1930, he became the first writer from the United States (and the first from the Americas) to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters." He is best known for his novels Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927), Dodsworth (1929), and It Can't Happen Here (1935). His works are known for their critical views of American capitalism and materialism in the interwar period. He is also respected for his strong characterizations of modern working women. H. L. Mencken wrote of him, "[If] there was ever a novelist among us with an authentic call to the trade ... it is this red-haired tornado from the Minnesota wilds." Compared to his contemporaries, Lewis's reputation suffered a precipitous decline among literary scholars throughout the 20th century. Despite his enormous popularity during the 1920s, by the 21st century most of his works had been eclipsed in prominence by other writers with less commercial success during the same time period, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Since the 2010s there has been renewed interest in Lewis's work, in particular his 1935 dystopian satire It Can't Happen Here. In the aftermath of the 2016 United States presidential election, It Can't Happen Here surged to the top of Amazon's list of best-selling books. Scholars have found eerie parallels in his novels to the COVID-19 crisis, and to the rise of Donald Trump. He has been honored by the U.S. Postal Service with a postage stamp in the Great Americans series. (wikipedia.org)