Word: kingsblood
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Dates: during 1947-1947
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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...
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...
Ever present in Kingsblood Royal is Lewis' old, skilled ability to catalogue sarcastically the interiors of middle-class American homes and offices. Ever absent is what talent he once possessed for building characters out of flesh & blood rather than rage and cardboard...