N.C. was never Eustace Tilley’s kind of place

“Slowly the conviction deepens that not even Mr. Sinclair Lewis was able to do full justice to the Babbitt type….

“In a North Carolinian city, the local committees, Rotarians, Chamber of Commerce and the like, met to decide upon a form of welcome for the visiting [New York Symphony] which would sustain the South’s reputation for cordiality. At last they hit upon the ideal plan.

“When the tired members of the orchestra tumbled from their [railroad] car, they were met by the blare of fourteen wind instruments, tortured in the dissonances of the Shriners’ Brass Band.”

— Talk of the Town item in  The New Yorker, Sept. 26, 1925

The fledgling weekly took seven months to make its first mention of North Carolina, and a rave it wasn’t.

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