Outlook

Endowment leads to SCSU annual conference

Monday, April 3, 2006

A long-ago friendship made possible an interdisciplinary conference in honor of the contributions of Sinclair Lewis to American culture and letters.

In 1947, Ida Kay Compton began a friendship with Lewis that lasted until his death. Upon her death, SCSU received an endowment to develop an annual conference honoring the Pulitzer Prize-winning author.

The conference, “The American Village in a Global Setting,” brought to campus essayist and poet Bill Holm, whose books include “The Dead Get By with Everything”; Walter Kalaidjian, author of “The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism”; Sally Parry, who has edited two collections of short stories by Lewis; and Susan Shillinglaw, director of the Center for Steinbeck Studies at San José State University.

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