I have been reading Sinclair Lewis, one of the American writers I idolize, again. The novel is something special even coming from one of the most observant voices ever to see print in this country. Kingsblood Royal, published in 1945, is one of the first novels by a white writer to take an honest look at race relations between whites and African-Americans in the United States.

The novel adopts one of the typical literary devices of early writing about race — passing. It resembles James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912) in that regard. The main character, Neil Kingsblood, physically resembles Walter White, the famous leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People during that era. Lewis knew both Johnson and White. However, the novel is original in both its writing and its secondary theme — the banality of much of white middle-class life. Though that life is held up as a standard the world over, Lewis dares ask if it deserves emulation.

Neil Kingsblood discovers he has a smidgen of West African ancestry through a black ancestor from Martinique while researching his family's genealogy in hope of supporting his father's belief the Kingbloods are the real heirs to the British throne. To his surprise, Xavier Pic is everything a person would want in an ancestor — intelligent, resourceful and brave — but he is also a Negro. Kingsblood is the kind of person who can't just hold information in his head, he feels compelled to act on it. So, he begins a series of acts that will result in the white friends and family he has never questioned the values of before ostracizing him by the end of the novel. Along with the ostracism comes joblessness, humilation and ultimately, a violent effort to deprive him of home and hearth. The first step on that journey? Kingsblood claims his black ancestry.

There are compensations for the protagonist. In his peregrination toward becoming a person instead of just a white man, he meets people who truly impress him for the first time in his life — on the 'wrong' side of the color line. Kingsblood also discovers strengths in himself and his wife he would not have known existed otherwise. No one, including hypocritical white liberals , escapes his new ability to probe deeply and analyze correctly.

With the race talk, which was as resistless to them as a ball of paper with a kitten, started all over again, Neil learned that whenever a well-meaning white asks, "Wouldn't the Negroes be satisfied with--?" the answer is No. He learned that a Southern liberal is a man who explains to a Northern liberal that Beale Street has been rechristened Beale Avenue.