Babbitt

George F. Babbitt is a prosperous real-estate broker in the booming Midwestern city of Zenith — a booster, a joiner, a man who owns the right gadgets, holds the right opinions, and has never once asked himself whether any of it is what he actually wanted. Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt (1922) follows two years of this perfectly ordinary life with such exact, accumulating detail that the comfort begins to look like a cage.

Then the surface cracks. The death of his closest friend, a recurring dream of escape, a creeping discontent he cannot name — and George Babbitt rebels. He drinks, he strays, he flirts with dangerous opinions and bohemian company, and he learns exactly what respectable Zenith does to a man who steps out of line. The revolt is brief, and it fails, but Lewis grants his hero one last act of grace that turns mockery toward something close to tenderness.

Written at the height of Lewis's powers, two years after Main Street and eight before he became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, Babbitt is the great satire of consumerism, conformity, and the hollow American success. It gave English a permanent word for the smug, materialistic complacency it skewers — and a century on, the diagnosis has not expired.

This edition pairs the complete text with an editor's foreword on the novel's making, technique, and lasting power, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.