Babbitt

Babbitt is a novel by the American writer Sinclair Lewis, published in 1922 and set in the fictional city of Zenith.

The first chapters follow one ordinary day in Babbitt's life, and the accumulation of detail is the method: the alarm clock, the breakfast, the children he cannot talk to, the letters he dictates to his employees, the deals he makes while complaining about other people's dishonesty, the meetings of the organisations he belongs to and the speeches he gives at them. Lewis was writing about the booster spirit of American business in the 1920s, the assumption that a city's growth and a man's standing are the same subject, and he lets the reader hear the language of it from the inside. What makes the book more than a satire is its middle, where Babbitt's dissatisfaction, an affair and a spell of real dislike for his own life push him away from his friends, and the last part of the novel, in which the pressure to conform does its work. Public reaction to the book was loud enough to be a factor in the decision to award Lewis the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930, and the word Babbitt has been used in English ever since for a businessman who conforms without thinking. It was filmed twice, as a silent in 1924 and as a talkie in 1934.