In this sardonic portrait of the up-and-coming middle class during America's most prosperous decade before the Great Depression, Sinclair Lewis perfectly captures the sound, the feel, and the attitudes of the generation that created the cult of consumer materialism that we all take for granted today. With a sharp eye for detail and keen powers of observation, Lewis tracks George Babbitt's daily struggles to rise to the top of his profession while maintaining his reputation as an upstanding family man.
But beneath the complacent fatade Lewis also reveals a confused interior Babbitt who is experiencing a rising, nameless discontent. His wife bores him, his children get on his nerves, his cronies at the club suddenly strike him as shallow, and for all of his success he can't shake the feeling that the sum of his life amounts to little more than a hollow shell. These feelings eventually lead Babbitt into risky escapades that threaten his family and his standing in the community.
Though published eighty years ago, this acerbic depiction of majority Americans, obsessed with success, material comfort, and mid-life doubt, still rings true. Lewis's enduring portrait remains a discomfiting reminder that there is a little of George Babbitt in all of us.
Harry Sinclair Lewis, the son of a physician, was born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, on February 7, 1885. Unattractive and unpopular, Lewis, at the age of seventeen, escaped his small town to enroll at Oberlin Academy in Ohio, in preparation for entrance to Yale University. It was at Yale that Lewis realized his ambition to be a writer. Dropping his first name, he began to contribute poetry and stories to the campus magazines. Lewis left Yale in his senior year to try his hand at freelance writing and to live and work at Helicon Hall, Upton Sinclair's experiment in community living in New Jersey. Following his failure at these ventures, Lewis returned to Yale, taking his degree in 1908.
For the next two years Lewis worked as a journalist, and from 1910 to 1915, as an editor at various New York publishing houses. Following the publication of his first serious novel, OUR MR. WRENN (1914), Lewis married Grace Livingstone Hegger, who worked at "Vogue" magazine. With the gradual success of his short stories, which began appearing in the "Saturday Evening Post" and other periodicals, Lewis could give up work as an editor and devote his full time to writing.
MAIN STREET, Lewis's sixth novel and his first major success, was published in 1920. The first of Lewis's great novels of the 1920s, it drew on his experience in Sauk Centre. Set in Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, it satirized the conformity and narrow-mindedness of Middle America. Lewis would broaden his attacks on American provincialism, commercialism, racial bigotry, religious fundamentalism, and fascism with his novels BABBITT (1922), ARROWSMITH (1925), ELMER GANTRY (1927), DODSWORTH (1929), and later, IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE (1935) and KINGSBLOOD ROYAL (1947).
Despite the success of his novels (he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1930) and the great wealth they earned, enabling him to live in both the United States and Europe, Lewis's personal life was dogged by unhappiness. After divorcing Grace Hegger in 1928, he married the newspaperwoman Dorothy Thompson, but that marriage soon fell apart. His son by his first wife was killed in World War II. Lewis's last years were plagued by alcoholism and loneliness. He died, alone, in Rome on January 10, 1951.
