Lewis’s mockery of this figure, and his world, made the novel a best seller, a critical hit, and a cultural lightning rod. For example, here’s what he sounds like when he flirts: “I feel it’s a man’s place to take a full, you might say, a creative share in the world’s work and mould conditions and have something to show for his life, don’t you think so?” Babbitt was the standardised man for a time in which mass standardisation was suddenly possible. Lewis filled the book with such cartoonishly inane dialogue. This eager, conformist, hypocritical, jargon-inflected patter was the voice of a dawning American century. Babbitt was the peppy, conservative local businessman who sang his town’s praises and spoke in his own dialect, Babbittry. Readers of Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 novel Babbitt recognised this titular figure instantly, and a “Babbitt” became a new type of guy, one who was flourishing in the post–World War I boom that had brought more Americans to newer urban areas across the country. At his office, Babbitt is “conventionally honest” and cheats only “as it was sanctified by precedent.” Prohibition, for instance, has done wonders for Zenith’s shiftless working class, but shouldn’t Babbitt and other “Good Fellows” be able to get a drinker’s license, to best exercise their personal liberty, which the state has infringed upon? In the morning, Babbitt wakes to the sound of the “best of nationally advertised and quantitatively produced alarm-clocks.” At the breakfast table, he opens the newspaper to taste “the exhilarating drug of Advocate-Times headlines.” To his neighbour, he says that what the country needs is a Republican president to run the government like a business, and his neighbour agrees. Babbitt, and he lived with his wife and three children in a Dutch Colonial home in the desirable neighbourhood of Floral Heights, on the outskirts of Zenith, a fictional city of around three hundred thousand in an unnamed Midwestern state.
One hundred years ago this September, the American suburban satire found its first definitive shape in the plump, pink body of a 46-year-old real estate agent.
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