Kingsblood Royal

"Kingsblood Royal" satirizes a self-satisfied town called Grand Republic. The hero and victim is Neil Kingsblood, a white World War II hero who believes that his family tree is covered with royal ancestors but finds to his distress that he is a direct descendant of a 100 percent Negro adventurer. This comes as a disabling shock because Neil had been brought up to view Negroes as less than human. That view was reinforced during the war, when he viewed black soldiers as lazy and dimwitted because they were denied arms and used primarily as laborers. The racist notions that Neil embraced in his "white" life become a threat to his humanity after he turns black. "Kingsblood" was published at a time when black people were mainly invisible in the white news media, except when they appeared as criminals or simple-minded servants. Lewis exploits this fact to great effect, turning up the lights on the faces of the black people in Grand Republic whom Neil had never before noticed. Venturing into the black part of town, he is astounded to encounter a broad array of black characters, some more cultured and literate than himself. Neil Kingsblood is impulsive, unable to control his tongue. He blurts out the secret and precipitates a dizzying fall for his family and himself. He loses his job at the bank and ends up working in a sporting-goods shop where the local matrons who suddenly "know" him to be black stare hungrily at his body, seeking signs of the animal sexuality they expect from Negroes. The news of Kingsblood's blackness eventually sends a mob to the family's door. This work is in the public domain in Canada, Australia, and other countries. It may still be copyrighted in some countries. The user should determine whether the work is in the public domain in their own country before using it.


Review: A forgotten masterpiece by the first American to win the Nobel Prize for literature, Kingsblood Royal involves a middle American banker who discovers he is part-black. This is Sinclair Lewis's most controversial book and his most explicit confrontation of race. Though popular at the time of publication, it was quickly expunged from the American literary radar and has since been out of print. It is as timely now as when first published. The Times's book critic, Orville Prescott, expressed the prevailing view when he denounced Kingsblood as "artificial, unconvincing . . . about as subtle as a lynching bee." But the black elite deluged the book with praise, and Ebony magazine, the voice of the black middle class.

Author / Editor: Lewis, Sinclair

Category: Novels

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