Babbitt

George F. Babbitt sells real estate in the booming Midwestern city of Zenith, and on the surface he has everything a 1920s American is supposed to want: a comfortable house, a respectable family, a seat among the town’s civic boosters. Sinclair Lewis pins him under a microscope, cataloguing the slang, the salesmanship, and the anxious conformity of the business class until Babbitt himself begins to chafe. A brush with his best friend’s ruin and a short-lived rebellion send him groping after something he cannot name. The novel handed the language a word, babbittry, for smug middle-class complacency, and remains Lewis’s sharpest portrait of American respectability and its discontents. Free to download as a PDF and EPUB.