 Cover of the first edition | |
| Author | Sinclair Lewis |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Racial discrimination |
| Genre | Satire |
| Publisher | Random House |
Publication date | 1947 |
Kingsblood Royal is a 1947 novel by American writer Sinclair Lewis.
| Cover of the first edition | |
| Author | Sinclair Lewis |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Racial discrimination |
| Genre | Satire |
| Publisher | Random House |
Publication date | 1947 |
Kingsblood Royal is a 1947 novel by American writer Sinclair Lewis.
The protagonist, Neil Kingsblood, a white middle-class man, discovers while researching his family background that he is directly descended from an African adventurer on the American frontier. (His ancestor is loosely modeled after Pierre Bonga, an African American who worked as a fur trader for the North West Company.) [1]
Through various machinations, Kingsblood loses his banking job and takes a lesser one. He begins to be treated differently by former acquaintances, despite the lack of visible black African ancestry. He is forced to choose between continuing what he has come to see as a hollow existence in the white community and taking on the oppressed minority status of the black community.
After Kingsblood tells several white friends about his newfound ancestry, the news quickly spreads, and he finds that acquaintances change their behavior toward him. He engages in a quixotic struggle against the racism newly apparent but widespread in his community.
Because Kingsblood is now black, it is illegal for him and his family to live in their home, which is in a whites-only neighborhood. In the climactic scene, which is based on the real life Ossian Sweet incident which occurred in Detroit in 1925, a mob of their former neighbors comes to force the Kingsbloods out. The sense of helplessness against massive injustice is broken only by the final line of the work, which offers hope for the future.
"Keep moving," said a policeman.
"We're moving," said Vestal.
Earlier on in his career, Lewis had reconnected with a childhood friend, Edward Francis Murphy, a priest with the Josephites (who specifically work with African Americans). Via this connection, Lewis learned of the intricacies of the black community in the United States, leading directly to his creation of the novel. [2]
Additionally, Lewis met Walter Francis White, president of the NAACP and a man of majority European ancestry, and many of his professional circles. A number among them were clearly persons of mixed ancestry, composing the educated elites of black society. Given their visible and in some cases majority European ancestry, some had relatives or friends who had chosen to live as white. Lewis consulted with White on the novel.
While some white critics found the novel contrived, Ebony, a prominent African-American magazine, ranked it as the most important novel of the year. "The white establishment tended to view the novel as wildly implausible. Black people viewed it as profoundly perceptive." [3]
That same year, Rev. Kenneth L. Patton of the First Unitarian Church in Madison, Wisconsin, having read the novel, formally "renounced" the white race and declared himself "colored," saying he was one sixty-fourth Native American. Unlike Lewis's novel, however, Patton was met with general approval, including from his congregation and his family. The NAACP even heartily welcomed him into "the colored race." [4]
Shortly after the publication of Kingsblood Royal, a group of white supremacists sent a letter to J. Edgar Hoover encouraging the FBI to seize all copies of the book and declare Lewis' novel an act of sedition. [5]
Harry Sinclair Lewis was an American writer and playwright. In 1930, he became the first writer from the United States to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters." His works are known for their critical views of American capitalism and materialism in the interwar period. He is also respected for his strong characterizations of modern working women. H. L. Mencken wrote of him, "[If] there was ever a novelist among us with an authentic call to the trade ... it is this red-haired tornado from the Minnesota wilds."
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was an American sociologist, socialist, historian, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, author, writer and editor. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in a relatively tolerant and integrated community, and after completing graduate work at the University of Berlin and Harvard, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate, he became a professor of history, sociology and economics at Atlanta University. Du Bois was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.
Melungeons is a term for numerous groups of people of the Southeastern United States who descend from European and Sub-Saharan African settlers. Historically, the Melungeons were associated with settlements in the Cumberland Gap area of central Appalachia, which includes portions of East Tennessee, Southwest Virginia, and eastern Kentucky.
Arrowsmith is a novel by American author Sinclair Lewis, first published in 1925. It won the 1926 Pulitzer Prize. Lewis was greatly assisted in its preparation by science writer Paul de Kruif, who received 25% of the royalties on sales, although Lewis was listed as the sole author. Arrowsmith is an early major novel dealing with the culture of science. It was written in the period after the reforms of medical education flowing from the Flexner Report on Medical Education in the United States and Canada: A Report to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1910, which had called on medical schools in the United States to adhere to mainstream science in their teaching and research.
Walter Francis White was an African-American civil rights activist who led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for a quarter of a century, 1929–1955, after joining the organization as an investigator in 1918. He directed a broad program of legal challenges to racial segregation and disfranchisement. He was also a journalist, novelist, and essayist. He graduated in 1916 from Atlanta University.
Colored or coloured, is an ethnic descriptor historically used in the United States and other European-settled countries and their former colonies. In many of these places, it is now considered an ethnic slur, though has taken on a special meaning in Southern Africa. Historically, the term denoted non-white individuals generally. The commonly used term today is people of color.
The one-drop rule is a social and legal principle of racial classification that was prominent in the 20th century in the United States. It asserted that any person with even one ancestor of black ancestry is considered black.
Jessie Redmon Fauset was an African-American editor, poet, essayist, novelist, and educator. Her literary work helped sculpt African-American literature in the 1920s as she focused on portraying a true image of African-American life and history. Her black fictional characters were working professionals which was an inconceivable concept to American society during this time Her story lines related to themes of racial discrimination, "passing", and feminism. From 1919 to 1926, Fauset's position as literary editor of The Crisis, a NAACP magazine, allowed her to contribute to the Harlem Renaissance by promoting literary work that related to the social movements of this era. Through her work as a literary editor and reviewer, she discouraged black writers from lessening the racial qualities of the characters in their work, and encouraged them to write honestly and openly about the African-American race. She wanted a realistic and positive representation of the African-American community in literature that had never before been as prominently displayed. Before and after working on The Crisis, she worked for decades as a French teacher in public schools in Washington, DC, and New York City. She published four novels during the 1920s and 1930s, exploring the lives of the black middle class. She also was the editor and co-author of the African-American children's magazine The Brownies' Book. She is known for discovering and mentoring other African-American writers, including Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay.
John Hope, born in Augusta, Georgia, was an American educator and political activist, the first African-descended president of both Morehouse College in 1906 and of Atlanta University in 1929, where he worked to develop graduate programs. Both are historically Black colleges.
Anatole Paul Broyard was an American writer, literary critic, and editor from New Orleans who wrote for The New York Times. In addition to his many reviews and columns, he published short stories, essays, and two books during his lifetime. His autobiographical works, Intoxicated by My Illness (1992) and Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir (1993), were published after his death. He moved to Brooklyn, New York, with his family as a youth. His daughter Bliss Broyard wrote and was interviewed about the family.
In societies that regard some races or ethnic groups of people as dominant or superior and others as subordinate or inferior, hypodescent refers to the automatic assignment by the dominant culture of children of a mixed union or sexual relations between members of different socioeconomic groups or ethnic groups to the subordinate group. The opposite practice is hyperdescent, in which children are assigned to the race that is considered dominant or superior.
The National Negro Committee was created in response to the Springfield race riot of 1908 against the black community in Springfield, Illinois. Prominent black activists and white progressives called for a national conference to discuss African American civil rights. They met to address the social, economic, and political rights of African Americans. This gathering served as the predecessor to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which was formally named during the second meeting in May 1910.
Racial passing occurs when a person classified as a member of a racial group is accepted or perceived ("passes") as a member of another. Historically, the term has been used primarily in the United States to describe a person of color or of multiracial ancestry who assimilated into the white majority to escape the legal and social conventions of racial segregation and discrimination.
Pierre Chimakadewiiash Bonga was a black trapper and interpreter for the North West Company, based in Canada near Mackinac Island. He later worked for John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company, primarily along the Red River of the North and near Lake Superior in present-day Wisconsin and Minnesota.
The House Behind the Cedars is a 1927 silent race film directed, written, produced and distributed by the noted director Oscar Micheaux. It was loosely adapted from the 1900 novel of the same name by African-American writer Charles W. Chesnutt, who explored issues of race, class and identity in the post-Civil War South. No print of the film is known to exist, and it is considered lost. Micheaux remade the film in 1932 under the title Veiled Aristocrats.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is a civil rights organization in the United States, formed in 1909 as an interracial endeavor to advance justice for African Americans by a group including W. E. B. Du Bois, Mary White Ovington, Moorfield Storey and Ida B. Wells.
Our Mr. Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man is a 1914 novel by Sinclair Lewis and the first to be published under his real name.
The Man Who Knew Coolidge is a 1928 satirical novel by Sinclair Lewis. It features the return of several characters from Lewis' previous works, including George Babbitt and Elmer Gantry. Additionally, it sees a return to the familiar territory of Lewis' fictional American city of Zenith, in the state of Winnemac. Presented as six long, uninterrupted monologues by Lowell Schmalz, a travelling salesman in office supplies, the eponymous first section was originally published in The American Mercury in 1927.
Allan Eugene Updegraff (1883–1965) was an American-born novelist, poet, and editor. After he and his friend, Sinclair Lewis, dropped out of Yale during his junior year, he made a living working odd jobs, as well as writing stories for magazines and newspapers. In 1917 he had his first novel published. He moved to Paris in the mid 1920s, where he lived until his death in 1965. In addition to his six novels, he published poetry, short stories and essays, as well as having a short stint as a book reviewer. He was married twice: after a brief marriage to Edith Summers, which produced two children, he married freelance writer and fashion consultant Dora Loues Miller, who he remained married to for more than forty years, until his death in 1965.
Anita Florence Hemmings was known as the first Bi-racial woman to graduate from Vassar College. After graduation she became a librarian at the Boston Public Library.