These things don't happen in isolation. For example (I seem to have a lot of them!) I had a graduate school class about the work of Aldo Leopold a number of years ago with environmental philosopher and Leopold scholar J. Baird Callicott. Over the years he'd worked to publish Leopold's early essays and trace how he evolved from Forester and Wildlife manager into the philosopher he is recognized as today.

Callicott is a philosopher, not a literary scholar, but in various of his classes I took I would frequently bring literature in as examples of how people were thinking about events of the day and philosophical topics. In this particular class we were about four sessions into it when during our discussion I remarked "he sure quotes from Babbitt a lot." There was a nod of acceptance, if not understanding, from Callicott, but as we worked through the next few hours I saw his head pop up each time another Sinclair Lewis reference came in.

If you haven't read Babbitt, you've missed the classic illustration of a man who is a consumer who is keeping up with the Joneses and who is a Booster with a capital "B." And Leopold drew on this example (and also from Main Street) again and again. The literature showed exactly what he was concerned about in political and scientific decisions that were made to do with communities and public land management. When we decided on paper topics I had a couple of them that interested me, so I let Callicott decide which one he wanted to see. Without hesitation he asked me to write the Babbitt paper.

You know what? I'm certain that Sinclair Lewis and Aldo Leopold knew each other. They were only a year apart in age and were together at Yale. I think that over the years Leopold kept up with what Lewis was writing and drew on it in his own work. This kind of exchange of ideas is common in the world, in this case a serendipitous friendship between literary figure and scientist. I'd have to go to Wisconsin to read the Leopold papers to find out for sure (it isn't mentioned in the excellent biography written by Cut Meine). Leopold copiously wrote letters to his family and frequently mentioned what he was reading. I suspect contained in those letters is more information about Lewis.

Writers of any sort aren't working in a vacuum. You can find tons of examples of fiction writers reading essays and books on various science and political topics then incorporating the ideas into their fiction and poetry. It isn't difficult to understand how it gets back into the world of science and theory in the same way--scientists read novels and poetry and respond to it.

SRS (Who needs to revise that paper and send it out for publication somewhere.)