Although Lewis continued to publish novels throughout the 1930s and 1940s, they never received the praise or awards that his earlier work had earned.

In the 1930s, Lewis had started writing for the theater. His best-known play, It Can’t Happen Here (1936), a look at how fascism might flourish in the United States, was originally produced by the Federal Theatre Project, a Depression-era, government-funded program that created jobs for out-of-work theater people; it was widely produced all over the country. Lewis, a wealthy but lonely old man, died from complications due to alcoholism in Rome on January 10, 1951. True to form, he left one more novel (World So Wide), which was published after his death.

The Story

In Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis’s plotting is marvelous in that it seems not to have much of a structure. Events, almost all of them rather minor, occur as they do in our day-to-day experience and at first amount to what may be mistaken for a sketch of the ordinary. Only when we get to the place—the middle ground—that the main character occupies do we find a lucid, coherent succession of dramatic narrative. This chain of “events” occurs, in fact, in the middle of the novel, with a sequence of three dinner parties, each of which seems trivial in itself. Yet this series of parties turns the entire novel into an aching, often dizzying complaint about the terribly unfair demands of modern life.

The book begins with a day in the life of George F. Babbitt, a day sometime in April 1920, in the suburbs of the Midwestern city of Zenith. From his first moments of consciousness, when he is awakened by noise generated by someone trying to start a Model T, we share Babbitt’s thoughts and dreams. He goes back to sleep, trying to recover the recurrent image of a fairy child who tries to lead him out of the mundane and into an authentic life. We watch him dress, and we sit with him at breakfast, where we meet his wife, Myra, and their children, Theodore Roosevelt Babbitt, Verona, and Katherine (Tinka). We journey with him downtown to the real estate agency he runs. At his office, he cajoles and bullies those who work for him, wheedles, deals, and writes deceptive advertising copy, and also attempts to give up smoking. Although he comes up with a series of ingenious ways to make it harder for himself to put his hands on his own cigars, he never makes it hard enough; on his way to lunch at the Athletic Club, he stops and buys a cigar lighter for his car, a shiny device that impresses his cronies.

We lunch with Babbitt and his closest friend, whom he met in college, Paul Riesling, whose unhappiness Babbitt tries unsuccessfully to alleviate. After an unproductive afternoon at the office, we go home again with Babbitt, where we share an argumentative hour or two in the dining room. His idealistic daughter, Verona, educated at Bryn Mawr and now a secretary, fights with his high-spirited son, Ted, a fast-talking high school boy, over the use of the family car. Babbitt reads a magazine before retiring to his cot on the sleeping porch off the couple’s bedroom.

The Babbitts give a dinner party, which requires George to pick up an ice cream cake and also some bootlegged gin. The party comes off well: The couple’s friends and acquaintances get along perfectly, the conversation and food are fine, and Babbitt is so confident of his and his wife’s eminent place in Zenith society that he finally comes out and asks Myra if he can take a week, before their own vacation begins, and spend it fishing in Maine with Paul Riesling. Contented but wary, Myra agrees.

Convincing Riesling’s wife, Zilla, though, is quite another matter. The Babbitts visit them at their ultramodern apartment, and when the idea of the fishing trip is mentioned, Zilla explodes; only George’s bullying manages to persuade her to let Paul go. Their excursion is a retreat into the chummy world of male companionship. In smoke-filled Pullman cars, George swaps stories and jokes with the other men. In Maine, he wears flannel shirts and stops shaving, goes off with a guide into the wilds, plays cards, and drinks. And even though Paul seems just as gloomy as before, George returns to Zenith refreshed, feeling somehow hopeful and renewed.

This burst of hopefulness and renewal results in Babbitt’s becoming something of an orator at local Republican political meetings. His grandiosity melds with the half-truthfulness of his advertising jargon. Many, including and especially George F. Babbitt himself, are very impressed. Fully confident of his own worth, he attends his college reunion dinner, eager to regain the friendship of his former classmate Charles McKelvey, now one of the big names in local society. McKelvey and his wife, Lucille, are fixtures in Zenith’s newspaper society columns and entertain important people with British titles.