When Babbitt actually tries to express his feelings for Paul, the “shame of emotion” overpowers them (p. 137); and when Paul is jailed for shooting Zilla, Babbitt feels an overwhelming loss: “Babbitt returned to his office to realize that he faced a world which, without Paul, was meaningless” (p. 243).

Sadly, this desire for a closer relationship, some deeper connection with Paul, is necessarily accompanied by a fear of any such intimacy. Indeed, in the world that Babbitt inhabits, the fear of other men is never far. True, in the Pullman smoker to Maine, Babbitt feels a sense of freedom: “They were free, in a man’s world” (p. 126); and on a trip to another city, Babbitt sits in a hotel room, drinking and smoking cigars and swapping stories: “They were,” describes the narrator, “in fact males in a happy state of nature” (p. 155). Yet “nature,” as Babbitt understands it, requires a male always to play the Man. Men who are in any way unmanly become the objects of scorn and phobic loathing. The Rev. Mike Monday, a thinly disguised version of the popular evangelist preacher Billy Sunday, rants against “Lizzie boys” (homosexuals). Characters such as YMCA director Sheldon Smeeth, who insinuatingly tries to hold hands and pray with George, or real estate salesman Chet Laylock, whose “domestic confidences were as bubbling as a girl‘s” (p. 36), awaken in Babbitt a phobic revulsion. He finds with dismay that Tanis Judique’s circle contains “three overdressed and slightly effeminate young men” (p. 300); earlier, the narrator has implied that there is something very odd about Lucille McKelvey’s relationship with Horace Updike, “Zenith’s professional bachelor, a slim-waisted man of forty-six with an effeminate voice and taste in flowers, cretonnes, and flappers” (p. 88). For any male to incorporate any qualities that may be vaguely perceived as feminine—Babbitt notices his own “‘soft hands—like a woman’s. Aah! ’” (p. 241), and Myra’s physician notes that Babbitt, like most husbands, is a “‘lot more neurotic than the women!’” (p. 340)—verges on the criminal.

There’s No Bad Publicity

Like Main Street, which had generated much controversy and became an immediate best-seller, Babbitt aroused the indignation of many as it sold out across the United States. Sinclair Lewis’s satire of business in general and of particular aspects of business made him the target of journal and magazine articles and even cartoons for years. Yet the anger and outrage also made people want to talk about the book and thus created the need to read it. In Britain, and then through translations across Europe, George F. Babbitt became symbolic of what was good and bad in America. The negative publicity worked in Lewis’s favor.

Originally Main Street had been chosen to receive the 1921 Pulitzer Prize, but at the last moment the trustees of Columbia University (who award the prize) chose to give it instead to Edith Wharton’s novel The Age of Innocence. Similarly, Babbitt was also nominated for the Pulitzer, and in 1923 the prize again went to another novel: Willa Cather’s One of Ours. Lewis capitalized on this negative reception: When his novel Arrowsmith won the Pulitzer in 1926, he refused the prize by writing the committee a widely published letter, again causing controversy and of course more attention. Four years later, however, Lewis happily accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature; he was the first American writer to win it.

Lewis lived to see several of his works turned into films. Babbitt and Main Street were originally made as silent films and then shot again as talkies; Arrowsmith, Ann Vickers, and Dodsworth were also made into movies in the 1930s, and other novels were brought to the big screen in the 1940s. In the 1950s, with the development of television, Lewis’s works were adapted for the small screen. (His novel Elmer Gantry, which, when it was first written, was considered too sexually explicit, was finally filmed and appeared in cinemas nationwide in 1960.)

Yet Lewis’s success and fame waned following World War II. A shift in taste and values, away from the liberating spirit of the 1920s and the frustration of the Depression, and toward a very pro-business, conservative conformity, made his works seem less relevant to many.