Sinclair Lewis has declined somewhat in popularity and scholarly interest since his heyday in the 1920s, having generally been surpassed in literary reputation by his younger contemporaries like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and even Steinbeck. It is true that his dystopian 1936 novel It Can’t Happen Here, depicting the election of a political demagogue to the U.S. presidency who institutes a Fascist dictatorship, temporarily regained a wide popularity in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, the rest of his works are less well-known today than they may have been in the past. Perhaps the social satire that was the soul of his best-known novels seems less timely today, though the satire of small town American provincialism in Main Street (the 1920 novel that made his reputation), or the send-up of hypocritical Evangelist preachers in Elmer Gantry (1926) still remain as accurate as ever.
The novel that drew the attention of the Nobel committee, ultimately making Lewis the very first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, was his 1922 novel Babbitt. In their announcement of Lewis’s honor, they cited the novel’s protagonist, George F. Babbitt, as “the ideal of an American popular hero of the middle-class. The relativity of business morals as well as private rules of conduct is for him an accepted article of faith, and without hesitation he considers it God’s purpose that man should work, increase his income, and enjoy modern improvements.” The satire in the novel’s heart is of the self-important middle-class conservative businessman who believes the greatest human virtues lie in boosting his home town, following good business principles, and conforming to what everyone else in his social circle thinks. Some of the novel’s early detractors charged that Lewis’s portrait of Babbitt was an exaggeration, but his most vocal defender at the time, the even more cynical H.L. Mencken, wrote in an article called “Portrait of an American Citizen” that “it is not what [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.”
This idea that the novel is about “Americanism” is underscored by its setting. Babbitt is a proud citizen of Zenith, a midwestern city of 200-300,000 inhabitants in 1920, where all things are modern and forward looking, and its citizens see no reason ever to go to some moldy old cities of Europe that have nothing but history to commend them. Cities like Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Minneapolis and Kansas City all were suggested as the model for Zenith, which seems the epitome of such places. For Lewis, who thought all American cities tended to be interchangeable, it didn’t matter. Zenith could have been any of them.
The terms “Babbitt” and “Babbittry” became in succeeding decades synonymous with empty middle-class conformity, materialism, and complacency. J.R.R. Tolkien’s coining of “hobbit” was in part an allusion to Babbitt, since hobbits are characterized as self-satisfied comfortable middle-class types who are distrustful of strangers and think “adventures” are suspicious, and are devoted mostly to cozy comforts and good food. More closely, John Updike’s “Rabbit” Angstrom (from Rabbit Run and its sequels) is a successful and unfulfilled salesman in the Babbitt mold. The novel was number 46 on the Guardian list of greatest English language novels, and comes in at number 57 (alphabetically) on my own list of the “100 Most Lovable Novels in the English Language.”
Early reviewers who did not like the novel considered it “episodic” and virtually plotless. Episodic it may be, but there is a definite character arc for George Babbitt that takes him from orthodox capitalist business booster to tentative progressive thinker to pure bourgeois conformist again when his liberal sentiments threaten to cost him his place in society. The novel begins with seven chapters taking us through a single day in the life of Babbitt. At breakfast, he argues with his older daughter about her socialist leanings (when he thinks about the upcoming presidential election, he says “In my opinion, what the country needs, first and foremost, is a good, sound, business-like conduct of its affairs. What we need is—a business administration !”). He spends time nagging his high-school age son about taking his studies more seriously, and lauding his ten-year old daughter Tinka, who is apparently not old enough to cause him headaches yet. We then see him in his office: He runs a very successful real estate business. In everything he does, he exudes, well, Babbittry:
“Just as he was an Elk, a Booster, and a member of the Chamber of Commerce, just as the priests of the Presbyterian Church determined his every religious belief and the senators who controlled the Republican Party decided in little smoky rooms in Washington what he should think about disarmament, tariff, and Germany, so did the large national advertisers fix the surface of his life, fix what he believed to be his individuality.”
Nevertheless, Babbitt has occasional doubts about whether he is truly happy with this life he leads. One of the first things we see in the book is his dream before he wakes up in the morning—a recurring dream of a fairy girl he longs to follow. This vague, barely acknowledged discontent surfaces more on Babbitt’s lunch break, which he shares with his good friend and college roommate Paul Riesling. Paul’s discontent is more on the surface than Babbitt’s, and the two decide to try to get away from their wives for a vacation camping in Maine.
The vacation does get them away from their wives and responsibilities for a while, though Babbitt never really sheds his huckster personality. Salesmen he meets on the train are carbon copies of himself, and it’s hard to tell one from another:
“The men leaned back on their heels, put their hands in their trousers-pockets, and proclaimed their views with the booming profundity of a prosperous male repeating a thoroughly hackneyed statement about a matter of which he knows nothing whatever.”
On his return, Babbitt is as gung ho as ever. He begins to take a particular interest in the mayoral election in Zenith, and is especially eager to defeat the liberal candidate, Seneca Doane, who he is sure is a socialist, and finding that he can be a convincing public speaker, he campaigns for Doane’s opponent with speeches at various public events. Lewis is particularly biting in his description of Babbitt’s political views, which reek of mindless hypocrisy of which Babbitt himself is blissfully unaware:
“As to industrial conditions, however, Babbitt had thought a great deal, and his opinions may be coordinated as follows: ‘A good labor union is of value because it keeps out radical unions, which would destroy property. No one ought to be forced to belong to a union, however. All labor agitators who try to force men to join a union should be hanged. In fact, just between ourselves, there oughtn’t to be any unions allowed at all; and as it’s the best way of fighting the unions, every business man ought to belong to an employers’ association and to the Chamber of Commerce. In union there is strength. So any selfish hog who doesn’t join the Chamber of Commerce ought to be forced to.’”
Babbitt’s own stature reaches its height in Zenith on the day he is elected vice-president of the Boosters’ club. On that same day, his friend Paul shoots his wife. The incident is a major turning point in Babbitt’s life, and the crisis reaches a peak when his own wife and daughter leave him alone and go off to visit relatives. Babbitt’s misgivings about his life come to the fore—he begins to lead a more bohemian lifestyle, has an affair with another woman, drinks and parties, and even begins to think sympathetically of the socialist Doane. In his professional and social life, however, he begins to fall from favor among the movers and shakers of Zenith. When a strike sends Zenith businesses into belligerent stance, Babbitt asks his wife, “Honest, do you think people would think I was too liberal if I just said the strikers were decent?” She replies, “Of course they would. But don’t worry, dear; I know you don’t mean a word of it.” As Lewis puts it, “The independence seeped out of him and he walked the streets alone, afraid of men’s cynical eyes and the incessant hiss of whispering.”
I won’t give away the ending, but I’ve given you the overall direction of the book. The American dream as embodied in financial success, progress as embodied in consumerism, and the ultimate emptiness of that dream—the yearning for the “fairy girl” of Babbitt’s dream—these are the major themes of the novel. Lewis dedicated the novel to Edith Wharton, who had been given the Pulitzer Prize the previous year for Age of Innocence—after the governing board had overruled the selection committee, which had voted to give the award to Lewis’s Main Street. Wharton’s novel was more “wholesome,” the board decided, and didn’t offend so many people. Lewis had written a congratulatory letter to Wharton, who replied that if the board thought her book “wholesome,” they must have misread it. In 1923, the Pulitzer committee once again wanted to give the award to Lewis for Babbitt. But they were overruled again. When the Pulitzer board finally agreed to give Lewis the award for Arrowsmith in 1926, he refused to accept it. He did not, however, decline the Nobel four years later. And you, Dear Reader, should not decline the chance to read Babbitt, even if it isn’t all that “wholesome.”