Hike and the Aeroplane

Two decades before he won the Nobel Prize, Sinclair Lewis published this lost Boys' Own adventure - a time capsule of early American optimism and the giddy wonder of the first aviation age. Hike Griffin and his friend Poodle Darby ride the rugged California canyons where Hike bravely saves Poodle from a spooked horse, forging a friendship that will carry them into stranger territory: a mysterious aerodrome where eccentric aviator Martin Priest is building an experimental tetrahedral aeroplane, a flying machine decades ahead of its time. The novel captures a nation on the cusp of the impossible becoming real, seen through the wide eyes of boys for whom every horizon promises discovery. This newly resurrected text offers something rare: a glimpse of Lewis before he became Lewis, writing pure adventure fiction with the same energy that would later dissect American small-town life.