BABBITT
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BABBITT by Sinclair Lewis, is a satirical novel about American culture and society that critiques the vacuity of middle class life and the social pressure toward conformity. It was published in 1922 by Harcourt, Brace, and Company.
The controversy provoked by Babbitt was influential in the decision to award the Nobel Prize in Literature to Lewis in 1930. The novel has been filmed twice, once as a silent in 1924 and remade as a talkie in 1934.
The word Babbitt has entered the English language as a "person and especially a business or professional man who conforms unthinkingly to prevailing middle-class standards"
The social critic and satirist H. L. Mencken, an ardent supporter of Sinclair Lewis, called himself “an old professor of Babbittry” and said that Babbitt was a stunning work of literary realism about American society. To Mencken, George F. Babbitt was an archetype of the American city dwellers who touted the virtues of Republicanism, Presbyterianism, and absolute conformity because "it is not what he [Babbitt] feels and aspires that moves him primarily; it is what the folks about him will think of him. His politics is communal politics, mob politics, herd politics; his religion is a public rite wholly without subjective significance." Mencken said that Babbitt was the literary embodiment of everything wrong with American society.
The Smart Set's review of the novel stated, "There is no plot whatever... Babbitt simply grows two years older as the tale unfolds."
BABBITT
$12.99