Editors Reads Verdict
Lewis's most precisely achieved satire — Babbitt is so fully realized a portrait of American business culture that his name became a common noun, and the novel's examination of a man who almost escapes his own life before returning to it remains one of American fiction's most honest and uncomfortable achievements.
What We Loved
- Babbitt himself is one of American fiction's greatest characterizations — vivid, precise, fully three-dimensional, and uncomfortably familiar
- The sociological detail of Zenith is extraordinary — the novel functions simultaneously as fiction and as sociological document
- The rebellion-and-return arc is handled with unusual honesty — Lewis does not allow his protagonist an escape he hasn't earned
- The satire of boosterism, business culture, and civic conformity is both funny and genuinely analytical
Minor Drawbacks
- The female characters — Babbitt's wife, his mistress, his daughter — are less developed than the male world the novel inhabits
- The satirical method can feel relentless; the novel allows Babbitt little interiority that isn't immediately deflated
- Some of the business and civic jargon, while satirically accurate, has dated
Key Takeaways
- → Conformity and business culture are mutually reinforcing: to succeed in the one requires submission to the other
- → The American businessman's self-satisfaction conceals — and barely conceals — a persistent dissatisfaction that no amount of success can address
- → Small rebellion is available to men in Babbitt's position; genuine escape is not
- → The novel's title became a noun because Lewis identified a genuine social type — the Babbit is still among us
| Author | Sinclair Lewis |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Signet Classics |
| Pages | 336 |
| Published | September 14, 1922 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Classic Fiction, American Literature, Social Satire |
The Word That Became a Noun
Babbitt was published in 1922, two years after Main Street, and where the earlier novel attacked the small town, this one attacked the city — or rather, the Midwestern city as a particular kind of social formation, with its Booster clubs and Rotary luncheons and real estate conventions and civic pride that is indistinguishable from commercial self-interest. Lewis named his fictional city Zenith, set it in the fictional state of Winnemac, and made it the most detailed and specific imaginary American city in fiction. Within a few years, “babbitt” had entered the English language as a common noun meaning a smug, conformist, philistine businessman. The portrait had been recognized.
George Follansbe Babbitt is forty-six years old, a real estate agent in Zenith, a booster and joiner and committee member and suburban homeowner. He has a wife, two children, a house in Floral Heights, a car he is intensely proud of, and a set of opinions that are indistinguishable from the opinions of every other prosperous Zenith businessman. He is not happy. He does not know this, exactly, but he suspects it in the form of a recurring dream — a fairy child in a magic garden — and in the uneasy feeling that his life has become a series of performances with no one watching.
The Rebellion
About halfway through the novel, Babbitt rebels. His friend Paul Riesling — the one friend who has ever seemed real to him, the one person Babbitt can be approximately honest with — shoots his wife and goes to prison. The event breaks something in Babbitt’s social confidence, and he begins, tentatively and without much conviction, to deviate: he takes a liberal position on a labor dispute, he begins an affair with a widow, he associates with a bohemian crowd that holds opinions his business friends consider dangerous.
Lewis is precise about the nature and limits of this rebellion. It is not ideological — Babbitt does not develop convictions. It is not romantic in any meaningful sense — the affair provides companionship rather than passion. It is simply the behavior of a man who has briefly stopped performing his social role and is trying to find out what he actually is underneath it. The answer, Lewis shows with uncomfortable honesty, is not very different from what the performance indicated.
Return to Zenith
The rebellion collapses under social pressure — Babbitt’s business associates make clear that his liberal associations are damaging his career, and he is susceptible to exactly the pressures Lewis has spent the novel anatomizing. He returns to the Good Citizens’ League, to boosterism, to the opinions he is supposed to hold. The ending is not triumphant but it is not entirely defeated either: Babbitt’s son announces that he is dropping out of college to marry a factory girl, and Babbitt — in the novel’s most unexpectedly moving moment — tells him to go ahead and fight for what he wants. “I’ve never done a single thing I’ve wanted to in my whole life,” Babbitt tells his son. It is the most honest thing he says in the novel, and it comes at the end, when there is nothing left to do with the honesty except pass it on.
Our rating: 4.3/5 — The definitive portrait of American business conformity — a character so precisely observed that his name became the English language’s word for what he represents.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "Babbitt" about?
George F. Babbitt, a real estate agent in the fictional Midwestern city of Zenith, is the model American businessman — boosterish, conformist, self-satisfied — who attempts a brief, doomed rebellion against his own life. Lewis's most famous novel gave English a common noun and remains the defining portrait of the American businessman as a social type.
What are the key takeaways from "Babbitt"?
Conformity and business culture are mutually reinforcing: to succeed in the one requires submission to the other The American businessman's self-satisfaction conceals — and barely conceals — a persistent dissatisfaction that no amount of success can address Small rebellion is available to men in Babbitt's position; genuine escape is not The novel's title became a noun because Lewis identified a genuine social type — the Babbit is still among us
Is "Babbitt" worth reading?
Lewis's most precisely achieved satire — Babbitt is so fully realized a portrait of American business culture that his name became a common noun, and the novel's examination of a man who almost escapes his own life before returning to it remains one of American fiction's most honest and uncomfortable achievements.
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