In October - November 2005, we (Patrick and Mary Killough) co-taught for Montreat College, North Carolina, a course introducing to adults the 22 novels of Harry Sinclair Lewis and his boy's adventure tale, HIKE AND THE AEROPLANE. Why did we do it? How did we structure the course? How did students take to Lewis?

For a dozen years we have participated in the informal adult education program of Montreat College, Montreat, NC, called MCCALL (Montreat College Center for Adult Lifelong Learning). (See http://www.montreat.edu/academics/mccall/). MCCALL offers four week (eight contact hours) and six week (12 contact hours) courses in standard format of The Elderhostel Institute Network (see http://www.elderhostel.org/ein/intro.asp). Our Sinclair Lewis course was from 10:00 a.m. on six consecutive Wednesdays and had six two-hour classes.

Patrick, who retired in 1991 from U.S. foreign service ( Department of State), had taught numerous solo courses for MCCALL. He had also collaborated three times with Mary (whose PhD is in German and Linguistics from University of Texas/Austin) on MCCALL courses, THE GERMANS (twice) and JOHN HENRY NEWMAN: FROM CALVINIST TO CARDINAL.

Since the 1970s Patrick has been fascinated by informal education of adults, of the sort presented at service club meetings, in church sermons, GREAT DECISION foreign policy discussions, book clubs and the like. A special focus within that framework has been service clubs and their predecessor booster clubs. Early on Patrick discovered Sinclair Lewis's skewering of Rotary in ELMER GANTRY and had found scattered other references to attacks by Lewis on service clubs.

The year 2005 is the Centennial of the founding of the first service club, the Rotary Club of Chicago. Some months ago Patrick joined the Rotary Global History Project (see http://www.rotaryhistoryfellowship.org/) and was surprised to discover certain stereotypical attitudes and even errors about Lewis's characters (e.g. the widespread belief among Rotarians that Lewis's fictional George F. BABBITT was a Rotarian (he was not; he was a Booster).

From this came our decision to offer an introductory survey of 23 of Lewis's books. In the process, Patrick would, inter alia, keep an eye out for remarks about service clubs. Mary would focus on Lewis's presentation of women. (For details see our web site at
http://www.patrickkillough.com/courses/sinclairlewis_outline.html and associated links.)

Our model for constructing our classes was an elderhostel course given a few years back at a Geneva Bay Centre elderhostel on Lake Geneva, Wisconsin
(see: http://www.covenantharbor.org/elderhostel_main.htm). It was a survey of Irish culture and literature. A Professor of the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee gave each of us a four page listing of Irish literature from beginning until now. With that bare outline before us, she then filled in the blanks in her lectures. We thought that was a helpful, doable and transferable approach for the many fewer works we would present about Sinclair Lewis.

Since Lewis's works were fewer and all in the first half of the 20th century, we could present them more depth than was done for the Irish literature list, especially Lewis's seven or eight 'best' works. But for each of the 23 books our core would be reading aloud selected passages. The books were presented chronologically. And each was located against Lewis's biography. Publishing history and critics' reaction were also given. In our final section there was a general summing up and free for all discussion.