About the book
Zenith, a fictional Midwestern city, is home to George F. Babbitt, a prosperous middle-aged real estate broker who belongs to all the right clubs and shares the opinions of his fellow Boosters. Sinclair Lewis opens with a single day in his life, from breakfast with his children to shady deals made while he condemns the same conduct in others. Yet the complacent Babbitt dreams of romance and escape. The satire takes on business, politics, religion and middle-class conformity. Its controversy influenced the decision to give Lewis the 1930 Nobel Prize in Literature, and the title became a word for a conformist businessman.
Ryan Holiday put it on his list of books most people have never heard of, recalling that in the 1920s it sold 130,000 copies in its first year and seemed sure to become a classic novel about the American Dream.
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This book has 1 recommendation
Ryan Holiday (Founder/Brass Check)
I don’t think there was anyone in the 1920s who would have believed that this book would be completely forgotten. By all accounts, it was destined to be a classic critical novel of the American Dream. You can’t read anything about the ’20s and ’30s that doesn’t comment on Babbitt (sold 130,000 copies its first year, HL Mencken loved it, it won Lewis a Nobel Prize). Calling someone a “Babbitt” was considered an insult and the phrase became a constant topic of conversation in the media and literature.
Yet, here we are 80-90 years later: you’ve probably never heard of the term or the book. Perhaps it’s because the biting satire of American suburban middle class life cuts deeper now than it did then. It doesn’t matter if the book is old, it’s still very funny and at its core, a critique of conformity and what Thoreau called the “life of quiet desperation.
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