REISSUED NOVEL
Sinclair, Harold
Reissued Novel AMERICAN YEARS by Harold Sinclair University of Illinois Press. 411 pp. $9.95 paperback. Harold Sinclair wrote eight novels and numerous other works of fiction and nonfic-tion...
...This University of Illinois Press reissue of the book—one in a series that also features works of Upton Sinclair and Edgar Lee Masters—should help to resurrect the body of work that an able and unsung Midwestern novelist left behind...
...But that one moderate success aside, Sinclair suffered the fate of legions of writers before and after him: a lifetime of laboring in obscurity, never receiving the popular appreciation or financial reward his work deserved...
...Former Washington Post reporter Ward Sinclair, one of the author's sons, has added an appreciative foreword, and there is also a historical introduction by Robert Bray...
...Harold Sinclair wrote eight novels and numerous other works of fiction and nonfic-tion between 1936 and his death thirty years later...
...It stands up now as a classical rendering of historical fiction...
...One of his books, The Horse Soldiers, was briefly on The New York Times best-seller list, and John Ford made it into a movie starring John Wayne...
...His second book, published in 1938, may have been his best...
...A meticulously researched historical novel about a Midwestern town in the years between 1830 and 1861 (actually, his home community of Bloomington, Illinois), American Years was valued by critics more than by book buyers...
Vol. 53 • April 1989 • No. 4
