Word: kingsblood
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...KINGSBLOOD ROYAL (348 pp.) −Sinclair Lewis− Random House...
Grandpa Kenneth Kingsblood, dentist and solid citizen of Grand Republic, Minn., had summoned the family to a conference. Ranging from oldsters to younglings, but all equally curious, they assembled "beneath the pictures of the Pilgrim Fathers and sleigh-rides and Venice, sitting on the imitation petit-point chairs, on the egg-yolk-yellow couch, on the floor, looking at one another and at souvenir ashtrays and an Album of the New York World's Fair." When they were settled, Grandpa Kingsblood informed them in a trembling voice that his son Neil had something on his mind "which he will...
...Kingsblood Royal (which is the Literary Guild's choice for June) is a novel chiefly in the sense that it contains some of the most artificial fiction, dressed in the worst prose, that "Red" Lewis has ever written. In essence, it is a cut-&-slash pamphlet, packed to the boards with ferocity, diatribe and disgust. Kingsblood Royal is not another onslaught on the old established fact of Southern discrimination; it is a blow at the smug white of the Northern cities-at the man who merely dabbled in race prejudice until the industrial needs of World War II caused...
Thou Art the Man. Such a dabbler, at first, was affable, average-man Neil Kingsblood. Like all his friends in Grand Republic, Neil simply took for granted that Negroes were unfit for racial equality because they were lazy, dishonest and incapable of intellectual development. And in this comfortable state of prejudice Neil remains-until he reads the old letter which proves to him that he is one-thirty-second-part Negro himself...
While Neil is innocently advancing toward this discovery, Author Lewis is sentimentally setting the stage for it. Neil is shown to have a lovely white wife, a little daughter "with [a] skin of strawberries and cream," a high-class home in a "restricted" residential district. Posed before Neil Kingsblood is the agonizing moral question: must I admit "my touch of the tarbrush" when I know what misery this admission will create for my wife and child...