Samuel ('Sam') Dodsworth is an ambitious and innovative automobile designer, who builds his fortunes in fictional Zenith, Winnemac, through the success of his Revelation Motor Company.

His forty-one-year-old wife, however, motivated by her own vanity and fear of lost youth, is dissatisfied with married life and small town Zenith, and wants to live in Europe permanently as an expatriate, not just visit for a few months.

'With his red Baedeker guide book in hand, he visits such well-known tourist attractions as Westminster Abbey, Notre Dame Cathedral, Sanssouci Palace, and the Piazza San Marco.

When he decides to go back to America for his college reunion in New Haven, Fran spends the summer months on the Alpine lakes near Montreux and Stresa, where she has a romance with Arnold Israel.

Fran next falls in love with nobleman Kurt von Obersdorf in Berlin, and stays on with him while Sam criss-crosses Europe attempting to cope with the breakdown of his marriage.

[3] In his analysis of the novel, Martin R. Ausmus has described Dodsworth as Lewis' "most sympathetic yet most savage", "most real" and "truest picture of the middle class" of America at the time.