Harold Sinclair (novelist)

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Harold Sinclair (1907–1966) was an Illinois writer who produced several historical novels, including some about settler life in the Midwest. He was also a musician, and wrote about jazz and New Orleans. He was born on May 8, 1907, in Chicago.{{cite book |last1=Ehrlich |first1=Eugene and Gorton Carruth |title=The Oxford Illustrated Literary Guide to the United States |date=1982 |publisher=Oxford University Press |location=New York}} At the age of eight he moved to Bloomington, Illinois. He dropped out of high school and traveled around the country, but eventually returned to live in Bloomington.{{cite web |title=Harold Sinclair |url=https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1420393.Harold_Sinclair |website=Goodreads |access-date=August 12, 2024}} While working in a hardware store in Chicago, he wrote his first book (Journey Home, 1936).{{cite book |title=Obituary |date=May 25, 1966 |publisher=New York Times |page=47}} The New York Times and Newsweek both published positive reviews of his second novel, American Years, in 1938.{{cite news |last1=Young |first1=Stanley |title=A Rich Panorama of Pioneering |publisher=New York Times |date=June 5, 1938}}{{cite news |last1=Rascoe |first1=Burton |title=Our History in Fiction |publisher=Newsweek, p. 28 |date=May 23, 1938}} It was the first of a trilogy about the town of Everton, Illinois, a fictional name for Bloomington. Roy W. Meyer said, "[Although n]ot properly a farm novel at all ... [t]here is a sense of authenticity in the account of the daily lives and concerns of these small town Illinois people".{{cite book |last1=Meyer |first1=Roy W. |title=The Middle Western Farm Novel in the Twentieth Century |date=1965 |publisher=University of Nebraska Press |location=Lincoln, NE |page=233}} In 1939 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in creative writing.

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His most well-known book, The Horse Soldiers (1956), was adapted and made into a film of the same name, by noted director John Ford and starring John Wayne, William Holden and Constance Towers.{{cite web |last1=Schenker |first1=Charlie |title=McHistory: Noted author Harold Sinclair of Bloomington |url=https://www.wglt.org/local-news/2021-12-07/mchistory-noted-author-harold-sinclair-of-bloomington |website=WGLT.org |date=December 7, 2021 |publisher=Illinois State University |access-date=August 12, 2024}} About the famous Grierson's Raid of April–May 1863, of Union Army Cavalry commander Col. Benjamin Grierson's (1826–1911) long raid southward from LaGrange, Tennessee through Confederate heartland of Mississippi to Federal-occupied Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and going around the besieged Confederacy's important vital Mississippi River fortress of Vicksburg, Mississippi during the Vicksburg Campaign in the American Civil War. Because The Horse Soldiers was such a commercial success in the 1960s (and remains popular 70 years later),{{citation needed|date=August 2024}} shortly before his 1966 death, Sinclair signed an option to have the 1958 sequel Civil War book that he wrote, The Cavalryman, become a made-for-television series. (It was unfortunately however never produced.) He passed away on May 24, 1966, in Bloomington.