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  • Published: 15 January 2002
  • ISBN: 9780375759253
  • Imprint: Random House US Group
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 432
  • RRP: $24.99

Babbitt




From the author of It Can't Happen Here, a satirical portrait of a town obsessed by capitalism and the 'values' of the marketplace

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.

  • Published: 15 January 2002
  • ISBN: 9780375759253
  • Imprint: Random House US Group
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 432
  • RRP: $24.99

About the author

Sinclair Lewis

Sinclair Lewis was an American playwright and novelist. Born in 1885, he received his bachelor's degree from Yale University in 1908 and published his first novel, Hike and the Aeroplane, in 1912. He published Babbitt, perhaps his most fanous work, in 1922 and in 1926 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Arrowsmith but rejected it. In 1930 he was the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in Rome, in 1951, and his last novel World So Wide was published posthumously.

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