Babbitt functions in literature as most people appear to function in life: He blends in, goes along, tries to uphold what is generally thought to be best for himself and perhaps his family and, at the same time, strives to make a buck. This blend of business not with pleasure but with what is supposed to be decency (which is never much fun) is an uneasy one. During the course of the narrative, Babbitt strays, questions his own misgivings, looks to end his own unhappiness, and rebels. In the end, he makes amends. Unwilling to accept the peril that comes with rebellion, Babbitt cautiously, but gratefully, injects himself back into the social matrix that he has come so close to despising. He is saved at the expense of being lost.

The Author

Harry Sinclair Lewis was born in Sauk Center, a village on the Minnesota prairie, on February 7, 1885. The third son of a country doctor, Lewis lost his mother (who had been the daughter of a doctor) when he was just six. His stepmother, née Isabel Warner, encouraged his reading and gave him access to his father’s extensive library. He attended public schools, where his red hair and bad complexion (caused by a chronic skin disease) made him the object of mockery. He went on to Oberlin Academy but quickly transferred to Yale. There in New Haven, and in New York City, he met socialist muckraker Upton Sinclair (at whose commune he worked as a janitor) and the great chronicler of the Yukon, Jack London (to whom he sold several plots for stories). He contributed to the university’s literary magazine, providing mostly romantic poetry and fiction about knights of old and their fair damsels. While in college, he spent his summer vacations shipping out on a trans-Atlantic cattle boat, looking for work on the Panama Canal, and struggling to earn money as a freelance writer.

After receiving his M.A. from Yale in 1908, Lewis worked his way across the country as an editor at publishing houses. In New York City’s artistic enclave, Greenwich Village, he met such leftist writers as Floyd Dell and John Reed, whose sympathetic first-person chronicle of the Bolshevik Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World, would become a classic. Lewis wrote a book page that was syndicated nationally. After he married Grace Livingston Hegger in 1914, the couple spent much time traveling the United States. Lewis published his first novel in 1912, and even the birth of a son, in 1917, did not slow him down: Between 1912 and 1920 he published six novels, only the last of which brought him any success. In Main Street (which came out in the autumn of 1920 and sold briskly through Christmas), Lewis depicts Carol Kennicott, an intelligent and independent woman who feels stifled by the small town, Gopher Prairie, in which she and her doctor husband live. Like Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, Carol has an affair with a young man, who she feels sure will take her away from her tedious rural life. Yet after the couple break up in Washington, D.C., she returns to Gopher Prairie, refusing to accept her failure but ultimately thwarted in her desire to create a life away from there.

Two years later, Lewis’s novel Babbitt was released and became an immediate best-seller. While Main Street exposes the lack of freedom and democracy in small-town American life, Babbitt lampoons the notion that American urban centers were at all urbane. Published in 1925, Lewis’s novel Arrowsmith follows an idealistic Midwestern doctor who, while treating an epidemic, is tempted by success. Elmer Gantry (1927) examines the life of a charismatic evangelical minister whose good fortune only deepens his hypocrisy. Dodsworth (1929) tells the story of a wealthy American couple (from Babbitt’s city of Zenith) who travel to Europe, where they realize that their marriage has failed. In 1930 Lewis was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Meanwhile, Lewis’s marriage, not unlike the Dodsworths’, had fallen apart. He divorced his first wife in 1928, and later that year he married the well-known foreign correspondent Dorothy Thompson, with whom he traveled throughout Europe. His drinking, however, was taking a toll on his life and career. Although he was financially secure, many of his friends were alienated by his alcoholism. He left Thompson in 1942 for a much younger woman and learned two years later that his son from his first marriage had been killed in combat in France.