eBooks - Literature - Literature - Sinclair Lewis - Babbitt
Babbitt eBooks
by Sinclair Lewis
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Babbitt Summary
| Zenith, Ohio, a good-sized city, is the setting for Sinclair Lewis's parody of middle-class American life represented by average citizen George F. Babbitt, a prosperous real estate agent. He considers himself a regular fellow who is a Rotarian, an Elk, a Republican, and makes use of the current slogans, and parrots the editorials of the local newspaper. A day in Babbitt's life is a view of the most disturbing examples of American policies of this period in history. There seems to be no escape from the ignorance and boorishness of his social neighborhood. A spiritual vacuum, a purposeless rushing about, constant noise and motor-obsession occupy the hypocritical businessmen who are surrounded by material wealth and unchallenged dissatisfaction. His affluence supports his lack of imagination, even though he feels the need to calm his deeper restlessness. Babbitt's unhappiness feeds off his fear of being shut out of the thoughts of his immediate superficial community. At the end of the book, Babbitt admits to his son, "I've never done a single thing I've wanted to in my whole life." Please Note: This book has been reformatted to be easy to read in true text, not scanned images that can sometimes be difficult to decipher. The Microsoft eBook has a contents page linked to the chapter headings for easy navigation. The Adobe eBook has bookmarks at chapter headings and is printable up to two full copies per year. Both versions are text searchable. |
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| Sinclair Lewis drew on his boyhood memories of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, to explore middle-class life in America as no writer had done before. These remarkable novels combine biting satire with an lingering affection for the men and women who, as he wrote of Babbitt, want to "seize something more than motor cars and a house before it's too late." |
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From the Introduction: "CHAPTER I THE towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. They were neither citadels nor churches, but frankly and beautifully office-buildings. The mist took pity on the fretted structures of earlier generations: the Post Office with its shingle-tortured mansard, the red brick minarets of hulking old houses, factories with stingy and sooted windows, wooden tenements colored like mud. The city was full of such grotesqueries, but the clean towers were thrusting them from the business center, and on the farther hills were shining new houses, homes--they seemed--for laughter and tranquillity. Over a concrete bridge fled a limousine of long sleek hood and noiseless engine. These people in evening clothes were returning from an all-night rehearsal of a Little Theater play, an artistic adventure considerably illuminated by champagne. Below the bridge curved a railroad, a maze of green and crimson lights. The New York Flyer boomed past, and twenty lines of polished steel leaped into the glare. In one of the skyscrapers the wires of the Associated Press were closing down. The telegraph operators wearily raised their celluloid eye-shades after a night of talking with Paris and Peking. Through the building crawled the scrubwomen, yawning, their old shoes slapping. The dawn mist spun away. Cues of men with lunch-boxes clumped toward the immensity of new factories, sheets of glass and hollow tile, glittering shops where five thousand men worked beneath one roof, pouring out the honest wares that would be sold up the Euphrates and across the veldt. The whistles rolled out in greeting a chorus cheerful as the April dawn; the song of labor in a city built--it seemed--for giants"
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Richard Lingeman is a senior editor of The Nation. He is the author of Small Town America, a biography of Theodore Dreiser, and Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street. From the Trade Paperback edition. |
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eBooks - Titles - Authors - Literature - Literature - Sinclair Lewis - Babbitt