Word: kingsblood
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...significant work is all concentrated in the ten-year span from 1920 to 1930. The novels after 1930, even the successful It Can't Happen Here and Kingsblood Royal, were jerry-built, and some of them were embarrassingly bad. E. M. Forster predicted his decline as early as Dodsworth; in an essay on Lewis called "A Camera Man," he wrote: "Photography is a pursuit for the young. So long as a writer has the freshness of youth on him, he can work the snapshot method, but when it passes he has nothing to fall back upon. It is here...
...Unjust). In Guard of Honor he not only shows again his fine descriptive talents but boldly tangles with two of the toughest subjects of the day-the nature of war, and racial intolerance. Guard of Honor is a big, fat book-much bigger than Sinclair Lewis' Kingsblood Royal or Laura Hobson's Gentleman's Agreement-bigger, and far better...
...comics any more corrupting than the classics? Of course not, said Capp. He told of a typical American family ("named Kinsey, of course") that wanted to shield young Kingsblood, 11, a comic fan, from "stories of murder, crime, violence and S-E-X." Before the Kinseys were through, said Capp, they had thrown out Oliver Twist, Alice in Wonderland, Shakespeare and everything but the phone book. Cracked Capp: "Mr. Brown is sorry that Li'I Abner isn't Huckleberry Finn. I'm sorry that Mr. Brown isn't George Jean Nathan...
Sinclair Lewis produced a novel that outsold anything he had ever written, including much better novels. Kingsblood Royal, his 19th novel, a crudely black & white dramatization of racial prejudice in a Midwestern town, hit an exposed nerve of U.S. society. So did a rash of other race-relations novels (led by Laura Hobson's Gentleman's Agreement). They were no doubt well-intended, but most were conscientious catastrophes, shrill and thin-blooded...
...novels with a great deal in common perched last week at the top of the best-seller list: Laura Z. Hobson's Gentleman's Agreement and Sinclair Lewis' Kingsblood Royal. Both were earnest, pamphleteering tracts on the U.S. race problem. As novels, they were not very good. Below them, the fictional bestseller list was studded with historical novels of a type which has become so standardized that even their book jackets look alike: an open-bosomed beauty in the foreground, a frigate in the distance...