Babbitt (novel)

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<tr><td colspan="2" style="text-align: center;">Image:Ms8.gif</td></tr><tr><td colspan="2" style="text-align: center;">Early Bantam Printing</td></tr> <tr><th>Country</th><td>United States</td></tr><tr><th>Language</th><td>English</td></tr><tr><th>Genre(s)</th><td>Satire</td></tr> <tr><th>Media Type</th><td>Print (Hardcover)</td></tr><tr><th>ISBN</th><td>NA</td></tr>

**Babbitt**
Author	Sinclair Lewis
Publisher	Harcourt, Brace & Co.
Released	1922

Babbitt is a novel by the American novelist and playwright Sinclair Lewis, first published in 1922. It is a satire about American values, and its main theme is the power of conformity and the vacuity of American life.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The book takes its name from the principal character, George Babbitt, a middle-aged real estate salesman. He lives a successful life professionally, but he is unhappy. He lives in the fictional town of Zenith, Winnemac, a state which lies adjacent to Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan. (Babbitt does not mention Zenith's state, though Lewis' later novel Arrowsmith elaborates on its location.) Critics say Zenith is loosely based on Cincinnati, Ohio. Zenith's chief virtue is conformity, and its religion is boosterism. Babbitt gradually becomes disillusioned with his lifestyle and then rebels against it. However, he eventually finds himself too weak to do so, and lapses back into conformity by the end of the novel.

Babbitt's success as a businessman is contrasted with his ignorance of contemporary social and economic conditions. Lewis, in one of the most dramatic chapters of the novel, deviates from his main narrative to examine the events of the world surrounding his protagonist. George Babbitt lives in complete ignorance of the lives and deaths of his contemporaries — he focuses on the drama of his own petty life and has no knowledge that entire decades of lived experience that perish while he mulls the petty details of his life.

Lewis's description of Babbitt as a man who sold houses "to people for more than they could afford" is one of the most biting and timeless critiques of American society. Babbitt can successfully sell a house on credit, but he cannot fathom the complexity of life in America — yet he is convinced that his success as a salesman is a virtue in itself. Implicit in Lewis' portrayal of Babbitt is President Coolidge's future statement that "The business of America is business." In other words, Babbitt is the image of the businessman who mistakes commercial success for an understanding of the world at large.

One of the historical notes about the book is its use of the political word "liberal" from Chapter XXVI (26) and following. The book was written not too long after the project of new liberalism began, and so the term had not yet congealed in the US as standing for a specific stance of the moderate left as in the later New Deal. Babbitt takes to the word liberal as literally meaning "not instantly critical of the left", rather than as an agenda for a set of social programs, and even though he is a conservative businessman.