Babbitt (1922), 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.
Gradually, Babbitt realizes his dissatisfaction with "The American Dream", and attempts to quell these feelings by going camping in Maine with his close friend and old college roommate Paul Riesling.
In time, Babbitt begins to rebel against all of the standards he formerly held: he jumps into liberal politics with famous socialist/"single tax" litigator Seneca Doane, conducts an extramarital affair, goes on various vacations, and cavorts around Zenith with bohemians and flappers.
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.
Lewis portrayed the American businessman as a man deeply dissatisfied with and privately aware of his shortcomings; he is “the most grievous victim of his own militant dullness” who secretly longed for freedom and romance.
[13] Readers who praised the psychological realism of the portrait admitted to regularly encountering Babbitts in real life but also could relate to some of the character's anxieties about conformity and personal fulfillment.
Published two years after Lewis's previous novel (Main Street, 1920), the story of George F. Babbitt was much anticipated because each novel presented a portrait of American society wherein “the principal character is brought into conflict with the accepted order of things, sufficiently to illustrate its ruthlessness.”[14] Although many other popular novelists writing at the time of Babbitt's publication depict the "Roaring Twenties" as an era of social change and disillusionment with material culture, modern scholars argue that Lewis was not himself a member of the "lost generation" of younger writers like Ernest Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Instead, he was influenced by the Progressive Era; and changes in the American identity that accompanied the country's rapid urbanization, technological growth, industrialization, and the closing of the frontier.
[15] Although the Progressive Era had built a protective barrier around the upstanding American businessman, one literary scholar wrote that "Lewis was fortunate enough to come on the scene just as the emperor's clothes were disappearing.
Although it was published in 1899, long before Babbitt, Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class, which critiqued consumer culture and social competition at the turn of the 20th century, is an oft-cited point of comparison.
[18] 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.
Lewis is the most phenomenally skillful exaggerator in literature today.”[21] Nonetheless, in its first year of publication, 140,997 copies of the novel were sold in the U.S.[22] In the mid-1920s, Babbitt-baiting became an irritant to American businessmen, Rotarians, and the like, who began defending the Babbitts of the U.S. by way of radio and magazine journalism.
That version, while remaining somewhat true to Lewis's novel, takes liberties with the plot, exaggerating Babbitt's affair and a sour real estate deal.
[citation needed] In November 2023, the La Jolla Playhouse premiered a play adaptation of Babbitt starring Matthew Broderick as part of their 2023-2024 Season.