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Kingsblood Royal: Confronting Racism and Social Injustice in America by [Sinclair Lewis]

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Sinclair Lewis

Kingsblood Royal: Confronting Racism and Social Injustice in America Kindle Edition

by Sinclair Lewis (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.3 131 ratings

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Kingsblood Royal by Sinclair Lewis: A Thought-Provoking Examination of Race and Identity: "Kingsblood Royal" by Sinclair Lewis is a thought-provoking novel that follows the journey of Neil Kingsblood, a white man who discovers that he has African American ancestry. The book explores issues of race, identity, and the deep-rooted prejudices that exist within society.

Key Aspects of the Book "Kingsblood Royal":
Racial Identity and Prejudice: "Kingsblood Royal" delves into the complexities of racial identity and the prejudice faced by individuals who do not fit neatly into societal categories.
Social Critique: The novel offers a critique of racism and the hypocrisies of a society that upholds racial hierarchies, challenging readers to confront their own biases and assumptions.
Personal Awakening: The book follows Neil Kingsblood's personal journey of self-discovery and his awakening to the systemic injustices and discrimination faced by marginalized communities.

Sinclair Lewis, born as Harry Sinclair Lewis in 1885 and passing away in 1951, was an American novelist and playwright. He was the first American to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded in 1930. Lewis is known for his satirical and critical portrayals of American society, tackling issues such as capitalism, conformity, and social inequalities.

Print length

348 pages
Language

English
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Publisher

Prabhat Prakashan
Publication date

May 16, 2019
File size

1699 KB
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Editorial Reviews

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1
Mr. Blingham, and may he fry in his own cooking-oil, was assistant treasurer of the Flaver-Saver Company. He was driving from New York to Winnipeg, accompanied by Mrs. Blingham and their horrible daughter. As they were New Yorkers, only a business trip could have dragged them into this wilderness, and they found everything west of Pennsylvania contemptible. They laughed at Chicago for daring to have skyscrapers and at Madison for pretending to have a university, and they stopped the car and shrieked when they entered Minnesota and saw a billboard advertising “Ten Thousand Lakes.”

Miss Blingham, whom they called “Sister,” commented, “Unless you had a New York sense of humor, you would never be able to understand why that sign is so funny!”

When they came to their first prairie hamlet in Minnesota, six cottages, a garage, a store and a tall red grain elevator, Mrs. Blingham giggled, “Why, they’ve got an Empire State Building here!”

“And all the Svensons and Bensons and Hensons go up to the Rainbow Room every evening!” gurgled Sister.

Their laughter buoyed them for a hundred miles, till it was time to think of lunch. Mrs. Blingham looked at the map. “Grand Republic, Minnesota. That seems to be about forty miles from here, and it’s quite a village—85,000 people.”

“Let’s try it. They ought to have some sort of a hotel to eat at,” yawned Mr. Blingham.

“All the best people there eat at the Salvation Army Shelter!” yelped Mrs. Blingham.

“Oh, you slay me!” said Sister.

When, from the bluffs of the Sorshay River, they looked down to the limestone shaft of the Blue Ox National Bank Building and the welter of steel and glass sheds that had been erected for the Wargate Wood Products Corporation since 1941, Mr. Blingham said, “Fair-sized war plant they got there.”

Since the beginning of World War II, Grand Republic had grown from 85,000 to 90,000. To some ninety thousand immortal souls, it was the center of the universe, and all distances were to be measured from it; Moscow was defined as a place 6,100 miles from Home, and Saudi Arabia as a market for Wargate wallboard and huts and propellers. The Blinghams, who knew that the true center of the solar system is the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, would have been irritated to find out how many of the simpletons in the valley below them believed that New York contained nothing but hotels, burlesque shows, a ghetto and Wall Street.

Mrs. Blingham urged, “Come on. We can’t waste all day looking at this dump. The hotel-guide gives the Pineland as the best place for chow. Let’s try it.”

They did not notice them, but on the way to the Pineland they must have passed scrollwork palaces of 1880, an Italian Catholic Church, a pawn-shop in which a Lithuanian lumberjack had recently pawned the Lüger pistol with which he had murdered a Siamese mining-camp cook, the best women’s dress-shop between Fort William and Dallas, a Victoria Cross aviator, and a Negro clergyman who was a Doctor of Philosophy.

In front of the tapestry-brick, nine-storied Hotel Pineland (designed by Lefleur, O’Flaherty, and Zipf of Minneapolis), Mr. Blingham said doubtfully, “Well, I suppose we can get some kind of grub here.”

They thought it very funny that the more choosy of the two restaurants in the Pineland should presumptuously be named “The Fiesole Room,” though they would not have found it funny if they had known that locally it was pronounced “Feesoly,” because that was how the Blinghams pronounced it, also,

The Fiesole Room had, for cinquecento atmosphere, Pompeian-red walls, majolica dishes, a Spanish wine-jar on either side of the doorway, and a frieze of antique Grecian runners done by a local portrait-painter.

“My, my, don’t they put on the dog in — what’s the name of this town again?” mocked Sister.

“Grand Rapids,” said Mr. Blingham.

“No, that’s the furniture, where Aunt Ella comes from. This,” said Mrs. Blingham authoritatively, after looking at the map, “is Grand Republic.

“What a silly name!” pronounced Sister. “Sounds like Fourthajuly. Oh, God, these hicks!”

They were elaborately escorted to a table by the headwaiter, a dignified, erect colored man whose head resembled a brown billiard ball. They did not know that he was Drexel Greenshaw, the leader of the conservative wing of the Negro Community. He looked like a bishop, like a general, like a senator, any of whom he might have been if he had chosen another calling than table-waiting and another color.

Mr. Blingham had the Hungarian goulash. Mrs. Blingham was bold in the matter of roast lamb. Sister took the chicken salad, snapping at the colored waiter, “And do try to have a little chicken in it, will yuh?”

They found it highly comic that the waiter bowed, and said, “Yes, Miss.” They could not have explained why they found it comic. As they said, “You have to be a New Yorker to understand our Sense of Humor. A nigger hash-hustler in a dump like this making like he was at the Ritz!”

It is true that in New York, on their evenings of festival, they did not dine at the Ritz but at a Schrafft’s.

Toying delicately with her chicken salad, but finishing all of it as well as all the rolls, Sister looked cynically about the Fiesole Room.

“Mm, mm! Respected parents, will you look at the table to my right? Please buy him for me—the young one.”

The person whom she had thus favored was an amiable man of thirty with solid shoulders and freckled paws and the clear skin that often goes with red hair like his. You thought of football, later tempered by tennis. But what you most noticed was the singular innocence of his blue eyes and the innocence and enthusiasm of his smile.

“He looks like a Scotch army officer,” approved Sister. “He ought to be wearing kilts.”

“Sister! And he looks to me like a shoe-clerk,” sniffed Mrs. Blingham.

With that, they forgot the young man, who was neither a shoe-clerk nor more than a quarter Scotch. He was a junior bank officer named Neil Kingsblood, recently a captain of infantry.

On their way north, after lunch, the Blinghams got off their proper route. They were too proud to ask questions of the barbaric natives, and they circled through the expensive residence district of Ottawa Heights and a new, gray-shingle and stucco and asphalt-roof and picture-window real-estate development called Sylvan Park. As they turned from Linden Lane upon Balsam Trail, they did not note a “colonial cottage,” new and neat and painty, with broad white clapboards and blue shutters, on the northwest corner; nor did they look at the brisk and handsome young woman and the four-year-old girl, all pink and pale gold, who were coming out of the cottage. Yet this was the house of Captain Neil Kingsblood, and these were his wife, Vestal, and Biddy, his lively daughter.

“I guess we’ll have to ask the way. Do you s’pose the folks out here speak English?” said Mrs. Blingham irritably.

That evening, as they were approaching Crookston, where they were to spend the night, Mr. Blingham mused, “What was the name of that burg where we had lunch today — where we got lost, leaving town?”

“Funny, I can’t remember it,” said Mrs. Blingham. “Big River or something.”

“Where the good-looking young man was,” said Sister. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From Library Journal

This novel has taken a back seat to Lewis's more noted works, e.g., Dodsworth. It deals with a successful white man who well into his life discovers that he is part black, quite a controversial subject for 1947. This might actually find a larger audience today.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

About the Author

Charles Johnson's many books include Middle Passage, which won the 1990 National Book Award. He lives in Seattle. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From the Inside Flap

A neglected tour de force by the first American to win the Nobel Prize in literature, Kingsblood Royal is a stirring and wickedly funny portrait of a man who resigns from the white race. When Neil Kingsblood a typical middle-American banker with a comfortable life makes the shocking discovery that he has African-American blood, the odyssey that ensues creates an unforgettable portrayal of two Americas, one black, one white.

As timely as when it was first published in 1947, one need only open today's newspaper to see the same issues passionately being discussed between blacks and whites that we find in Kingsblood Royal, says Charles Johnson. Perhaps only now can we fully appreciate Sinclair Lewis's astonishing achievement.
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From the Back Cover

A neglected tour de force by the first American to win the Nobel Prize in literature, Kingsblood Royal is a stirring and wickedly funny portrait of a man who resigns from the white race. When Neil Kingsblood a typical middle-American banker with a comfortable life makes the shocking discovery that he has African-American blood, the odyssey that ensues creates an unforgettable portrayal of two Americas, one black, one white.
As timely as when it was first published in 1947, one need only open today's newspaper to see the same issues passionately being discussed between blacks and whites that we find in Kingsblood Royal, says Charles Johnson. Perhaps only now can we fully appreciate Sinclair Lewis's astonishing achievement.
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Review

"There is more significant terror of a kind in Lewis's novels than in a writer like Faulkner... it is the terror imminent in the commonplace." --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B06VW7CKGS
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Prabhat Prakashan (May 16, 2019)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 16, 2019
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 1699 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 348 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #1,960,830 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
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Customer Reviews:
4.3 131 ratings

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Sinclair Lewis

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Sinclair Lewis was born in 1885 in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, and graduated from Yale University in 1908. His college career was interrupted by various part-time occupations, including a period working at the Helicon Home Colony, Upton Sinclair's socialist experiment in New Jersey. He worked for some years as a free lance editor and journalist, during which time he published several minor novels. But with the publication of Main Street (1920), which sold half a million copies, he achieved wide recognition. This was followed by the two novels considered by many to be his finest, Babbitt (1922) and Arrowsmith (1925), which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1926, but declined by Lewis. In 1930, following Elmer Gantry (1927) and Dodsworth (1929), Sinclair Lewis became the first American author to be awarded the Nobel Prize for distinction in world literature. This was the apogee of his literary career, and in the period from Ann Vickers (1933) to the posthumously published World So Wide (1951) Lewis wrote ten novels that reveal the progressive decline of his creative powers. From Main Street to Stockholm, a collection of his letters, was published in 1952, and The Man from Main Street, a collection of essays, in 1953. During his last years Sinclair Lewis wandered extensively in Europe, and after his death in Rome in 1951 his ashes were returned to his birthplace.

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G. B.

Things haven't changed as much as we would like to think

Reviewed in the United States on August 3, 2014

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Neil Kingsblood is an affluent white male who recently returned to the mythical town of Grand Republic, Minnesota after being wounded in World War II. After he settles into his predictable life of a rising bank executive, he is asked by his father, who believes that they have distant relatives in the English royal family, to research his genealogy. Instead Neil learns that his ancestor, thought to be a French voyager, was actually black, which makes him 1/32 black. He keeps the news from his family as he strives to learn more about the black society in his community, something completely alien to his upbringing and worldview. Thus begins an unpredictable life journey that changes his family, community and future.

Lewis’s depictions—as it was written in 1947—of Negro culture, white (and black) racism and the interaction between the races is as relevant today as it was then. Indeed, in the conversations Neil has with his new black friends, within his white social circle and his family are probably among the most honest I’ve ever read. The gradations of white racism that Lewis sums up in Chapter 31 are masterful highlights.

Lewis’s writing reveals idiosyncratic northern and southern racial stereotypes that hadn’t (and haven’t) changed much since the writing of Mark Twain’s classic Pudd’nhead Wilson. Considering the time since novel was written more than 75 years ago and taken together with the recent resurgence of vocal bigotry and racism in the U.S., an apt subtitle for it today might be: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Lewis has created some of the most iconic fictional figures in American literature—Carol Kennicott, George Babbitt, Martin Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, and Sam Dodsworth. Neil Kingsblood is less-known, but deserves his place alongside them. This great book is convincingly constructed on a foundation of moral clarity and human tension.

9 people found this helpful

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Melissa Cline

Heartbreaking

Reviewed in the United States on July 15, 2022

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I did a lot of flinching reading this. I was born in 1965 in Louisville KY. Growing up the N word was spanking worthy in my home, so seeing it tossed around by a toddler as the dog's original name a bit appalling.

This story is heartbreaking and unfortunately probably pretty accurate. Enough to make me ashamed to be white more than once. Wonderful advancement has been made, but you only have to turn on the evening news to see that not nearly enough has changed. This story isn't for the faint of heart by far.

3 people found this helpful

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Ted d'Afflisio

Kingsblood Royal

Reviewed in the United States on October 19, 2019

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Though many might consider this one of his minor works, the fact is it is a forward looking book examining the intricacies of racism, it’s vapidity and its unmoored from reality nature. The characters might be a caricature in many senses, but Lewis allows them to develop according to their nature.

Neil Kingsblood is a hero . He comes to terms with what he has learned of his ancestry not in an epiphany but in a slow struggle within himself that is human, rational and relatable. The same is true for Vestal.

At the end, I was waiting for the next chapter. I didn’t want it to end , the story was that compelling.

4 people found this helpful

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DB361

how much and how little we have changed

Reviewed in the United States on May 13, 2007

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Considered a minor and inferior novel compared to his best, it is "inferior" only in the sense that say, "Day Tripper" might be called an inferior Bealtes' single. Set immediately after WWII, it is the best kind of satire. That is, it seems wildly over the top that people's actions and attitudes toward race could be so ignorant, yet he is only, sadly, reporting on what people at the time actually believed and behaved. Like his "It can't Happen Here," about a greedy ignoramus who becomes President, it is unfortunately not merely a period piece. It is also prescient.

12 people found this helpful

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Waters

A big fan of Lewis for years

Reviewed in the United States on December 31, 2019

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I read many of his novel. Godseeker, Main Street, Arrowsmith, Babbit , It can't happen here, etc. This book moved me. As a black man, I found this book disturbing because it felt too read. The state of things now in this country and across the world...it is happening here and there. Not just to black but to other minorities. Truth and fiction. I recommend this book, as well as his others.

10 people found this helpful

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Donald S. Handy

Should Be Required Reading

Reviewed in the United States on December 30, 2012

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This is my favorite book by America's best satirist, Sinclair Lewis, which I like even more than Elmer Gantry. In it he educated this white-skinned reader as to how it was not just slavery that subjugated what was then known as the American negro; nor was segregation something that was limited to the south. Even though he idealizes people of color, and some of the language is somewhat stilted, the effect of this book is akin to a kick in the gut, forcing even this progressive to reevaluate the effect that racism continues to have in our society. This is an astounding work by a brave man, and should be required reading in high-school history classes.

4 people found this helpful

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jd

In my humble opinion...

Reviewed in the United States on June 21, 2014

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I think this is a must read book for anyone who wants to understand race relations in the US. It wasn't that long ago(and one could argue that it still happens) that having any African heritage made a person less. This book should help to create awareness for people who just don't seem to understand the pain associated with racial tension.

6 people found this helpful

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Marion Stein

Should be taught in high schools and colleges

Reviewed in the United States on June 24, 2012

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What a gem this novel is. I don't have much to add as the other five stars cover it well. It's amazing what has changed and what hasn't. There's a lot to discuss here and I'd love to see more people having the conversation. Certainly, any educator putting together a curriculum relating to "white privilege" or American attitudes about race, or post-WW II relationships between whites and blacks in Northern cities, or other related topics, should include this book.

4 people found this helpful

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gingernut

Absolutely loved this book and now passed onto my son

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 4, 2017

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Absolutely loved this book and now passed onto my son. Sinclair Lewis was a master in showing up white bigots for what they were in those times and I dare say it's still going on today. A must read for everyone, black or white. I couldn't put it down

One person found this helpful

Cecilia Rezende Barbosa

O autor é Prêmio Nobel ! Muito merecido!

Reviewed in Brazil on September 17, 2021

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Excelente retrato do cotidiano americano que vale a pena conhecer!

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Viktor K.

sehr gut

Reviewed in Germany on May 18, 2016

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hüpsch! sehr gut! wahnsinn! echt gut! stark! ich werde englishc lernen mit diesen buch hab ich schon erst in ungarisch gelesen.

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