Babbitt
by Sinclair Lewis
Summary
George F. Babbitt sells real estate in the fictional midwestern city of Zenith and believes, with total sincerity, everything his country club, his church and his neighbors believe: that boosting the city's growth is a form of civic virtue, that success is measured in gadgets and golf clubs, and that a man who thinks too hard about any of it is probably a crank. Sinclair Lewis opens with a single ordinary day in Babbitt's life, his morning routine, his real estate deals, his standing at the Zenith Athletic Club, before letting a single event crack that contentment open: his closest friend, Paul Riesling, a gentler man trapped in an unhappy marriage, shoots his own wife and goes to prison, and Babbitt watches the one person he actually loved get destroyed by exactly the conventional life Babbitt has spent his own life defending.
What follows is Babbitt's brief, halting rebellion. He flirts with liberal politics, keeps company with people his old crowd would consider bohemians, and begins an affair with a widow named Tanis Judique, all while sensing, without ever quite admitting it to himself, that none of it fits him any better than his old respectability did. The moment his wife falls seriously ill with appendicitis, Babbitt drops every one of these new attachments without a backward glance and returns fully to the conventional life he had only just tried to escape, chastened rather than transformed. The novel's real ending is quieter and sadder than his outward return to normal: when his son Ted elopes rather than go to college, Babbitt privately tells him he is glad, admitting, only to his own son and only once, that he never had the nerve to want anything for himself the way Ted just did.
Lewis writes Zenith's slang, furniture and social rituals with a satirist's precision and just enough affection that Babbitt reads as pitiable rather than simply ridiculous, and the effect is a portrait of American conformity specific enough that his name entered the language as a word for exactly this kind of man.
Historical Context & Significance
The Swedish Academy gave Sinclair Lewis the 1930 Nobel Prize in Literature for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters, making him the first American, and the first writer from the Americas, to win the literature prize. Babbitt, published in 1922, is the book that gave the language its word for the character type the citation is describing, a self satisfied, conformist businessman whose name still gets used today for exactly the kind of man Lewis drew.
Lewis had already turned down the Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith in 1926, reportedly still resentful that an earlier novel, Main Street, had been passed over for the same honor, so the Nobel arrived after Lewis had already staked out a public position against literary prizes generally. His Nobel lecture attacked American universities and critics for preferring literature that was, in his own words, clear and cold and pure and very dead, a swipe at the same respectable taste Babbitt himself embodies.