Sinclair Lewis interpreted, or at any rate pictured, the Middle
West as no other modern novelist has done. His Main Street, appearing in 1920 just after a war in which American participation had aroused a new interest here in the United States, fixed the idea of a small Middle West town firmly in British minds ; and Babbitt, two years later, created a type which in fact was by no means as typical as some English readers might assume. But after reading his later novel, Kingsblood Royal, on the lot of an American with a fraction of negro blood in him, I asked a good authority incredulously whether anything like this could be believed. He answered regietfully that it could ; the picture in fact was little, If anything, of an exaggeration. Main Street, I should expect, will be a good deal re-read now. It will bear it.
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