“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.