Babbitt - Hardcover

Sinclair Lewis

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786282118 ISBN 13: 9780786282111

Publisher: Thorndike Press, 2005

Synopsis

George Follansbee Babbitt is a middle-aged realtor in Zenith, Ohio. Unimaginative, self-important, and vaguely dissatisfied, he tries to alter the pattern of his life by flirting with liberalism and having an affair - only to find that his dread of ostracism is greater then his desire for escape. Lewis's seventh novel gave the language a word for a smug person who conforms to middle-class conventions.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

In the fall of 1920, Sinclair Lewis began a novel set in a fast-growing city with the heart and mind of a small town. For the center of his cutting satire of American business he created the bustling, shallow, and myopic George F. Babbitt, the epitome of middle-class mediocrity. The novel cemented Lewis's prominence as a social commentator.
Babbitt basks in his pedestrian success and the popularity it has brought him. He demands high moral standards from those around him while flirting with women, and he yearns to have rich friends while shunning those less fortunate than he. But Babbitt's secure complacency is shattered when his best friend is sent to prison, and he struggles to find meaning in his hollow life. He revolts, but finds that his former routine is not so easily thrown over.

From the Back Cover

“[It is] by its hardness, its efficiency, its compactness that Mr. Lewis’s work excels.”—Virginia Woolf

Edition details

• Publisher: Thorndike Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0786282118
• ISBN 13: 9780786282111
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 607