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| Edition: | Signet Classics (Mass Market Paperback) |
| Author: | Sinclair Lewis |
| Published: | August 2007 |
| Pages: | 416 |
| ISBN 10: | 0451530616 |
| New: | $3.00 (41) |
| Used: | $2.30 (57) |
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Babbitt, first published in 1922, is a novel by Sinclair Lewis. Largely a satire of American culture, society, and behavior, its main theme focuses on the power of conformity, and the vacuity of middle-class American life.
As is indicated in many editions of the book, the working title of Babbitt was Pumphrey.
Plot
The book takes its name from the principal character, George F. Babbitt, a middle-aged partner, with his father-in-law, in a real-estate firm. When the story begins, in April 1920, Babbitt is 46 years old. He is married, has three children (Verona, 22; Ted, 17; and Tinka, 10), and has a well-appointed house in the prosperous Floral Heights neighborhood of “Zenith," a fictitious city in the equally fictitious state of “Winnemac,” which is adjacent to Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan. (Babbitt does not mention Winnemac by name, though Lewis's later novel Arrowsmith elaborates on its location.) When Babbitt was published, newspapers in Cincinnati, Duluth, Kansas City, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis each claimed that their city was the model for Sinclair's Zenith. Cincinnati possessed perhaps the strongest argument for such a claim because Lewis had lived there for a time while researching Babbitt. Lewis's own correspondence suggests, however, that Zenith is meant to be any midwestern city with a population between about 200,000 and 300,000.
Zenith's chief virtue is conformity, and its religion is “boosterism.” Prominent boosters in Zenith include Vergil Gunch, the coal-dealer; Sidney Finkelstein, the ladies'-ready-to-wear buyer for Parcher & Stein's department-store; and Professor Joseph K. Pumphrey, owner of the Riteway Business College and “instructor in Public Speaking, Business English, Scenario Writing, and Commercial Law.”
Babbitt lives a professionally successful life, but is nevertheless unhappy. Lewis juxtaposes Babbitt's success as a businessman with his ignorance of contemporary social and economic conditions existing outside of his own family circle. His character lives with only the vaguest awareness of the lives and deaths of his contemporaries — he focuses instead on the drama of his own life, and the lives of those immediately connected to him. Gradually, though, he becomes dissatisfied with this perception, and eventually rebels against it — chiefly concerning forays into liberal politics, engaging in sexual trysts, and sympathy for his friend Paul Reisling who attempts to kill his wife - only to lapse back into conformity by the end of the novel.
