Study Guide to Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645423959
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Study Guides

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, a novel that contributed to Lewis’ eventual Nobel Prize award. As a satirical novel of the roaring twenties, Babbitt addresses the “American Dream” as was idolized by the middle class in early 20th century America. Moreover, this satirical work points to the attitudes, values, and beliefs of the American middle class living in such a prosperous time, with an emphasis on security and conformity. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Lewis’ classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&As The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including
essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO SINCLAIR LEWIS

Harry Sinclair Lewis (1885 - 1951), the youngest of three sons of a country doctor, was born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, on February 7, 1885. Although he was early interested in medicine, he did not, like his two brothers, follow in his father’s footsteps. It was, however, the interests and experiences of these early years which provided much of the material for his novel on the medical profession, Arrowsmith, in 1925.

EARLY YEARS

During his early years Lewis received such rudimentary education as was possible in a town still largely crude and undeveloped, an education which he supplemented by a voracious if undirected reading. Never fully able to communicate with his father, whom he greatly admired, Lewis developed into a shy, sensitive, intellectually curious boy. Nor did the death of his mother when he was six and the rapid remarriage of his father do anything to bring about a greater understanding between father and son. Thus, left largely to himself and to the ministrations of a stepmother whom he learned to love, it is not surprising that he found Sauk Centre stifling.

EDUCATION

At seventeen, after a year at preparatory school, Lewis left Sauk Centre to study at Yale. Still awkward, gangly and socially inept, he found life at Yale no more congenial than it had been at Sauk Centre. Nor indeed was he ever able to enjoy the easy companionship of his contemporaries. Always self-conscious about his appearance (red-haired, gangly, and later scarred as a result of X-ray treatments to his face), he inevitably alienated himself with his sharp tongue and satiric wit from those who might be close to him.

WANDERING YEARS

Nonetheless Lewis was active during his years at Yale. He contributed freely to the Courant and the Yale Literary Magazine and enjoyed the respect of a few friends and professors. During the summers of 1904 and 1906, he visited England as a crewman aboard a cattleboat. At the close of his Junior year, dissatisfied with himself and with Yale, he left and spent a few months at Helicon Hall, Upton Sinclair’s socialist colony in Englewood, New Jersey. He later attempted unsuccessfully to support himself as an editor and magazine writer. Finally in 1907, he returned to Yale and graduated in 1908.

EARLY WRITINGS

After graduation, still uncertain of what he wanted to do, Lewis wandered about the United States working at a variety of jobs. He worked for a time as a newspaper reporter and editor, and as an editor for various publishing houses, always continuously, but unsuccessfully writing short stories, poems and articles. By 1917, however, he had achieved some minor success. Always prolific, he had managed to sell some of his excess plot outlines to Jack London, and had numerous articles, poems, and short stories of his own published in numerous slick publications. And in addition to the Hike and the Aeroplane (1912), published under the pseudonym of Tom Graham, from 1914 to 1917, he published four novels: Our Mr. Wren (1914), The Trail of the Hawk (1915), The Job, and The Innocents (1917). Having thus achieved some small critical and financial success as a writer of potboiling romance, Lewis devoted his full time to his writing, and after another of this genre, Free Air (1919), he published the novel that was to make him famous, Main Street in 1920.

THE FABULOUS TWENTIES

Although Lewis’ earlier novels had contained some of the seeds of his satiric genius, it was not until the publication of Main Street that he found his mark. Never before had an American author seriously questioned or challenged the failings of middle-class American life. The novel, first tentatively titled “The Village Voices” contained such a fiercely satiric attack upon the mediocrity of middle-class achievements and narrowness of middle-class beliefs that it provoked a storm of controversy unparalleled in twentieth-century American Literature. Nor did the controversy subside with the publication of Babbitt in 1922. For here again Lewis as a talented observer and recorder of American life had found his mark. Having first explored the dullness and drabness of small town life, Lewis now almost clinically recorded the life of the dull and bourgeois American businessman, George F. Babbitt, whose very name has become a synonym for all those who are limited, unimaginative, and functionless.

FAMOUS AT LAST

In 1925, now a successful and famous author, Lewis published Arrowsmith with the aid of researcher Paul de Kruif. Although Lewis intended the book to be idealistic and positive, in it he vented his ire upon the commercialism, quackery, pseudo-science, and glory hunting in medical education, medical practice, and medical research. Thus like its predecessors, Arrowsmith is both a satire and a social commentary on some essential aspect of American Life. Although Arrowsmith is regarded by many critics as Lewis’ best book, Lewis refused the Pulitzer prize for it in 1926. Annoyed because Main Street and Babbitt had earlier been ignored, he denounced the prize, arguing that it was designed to make American writers “safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.”

FAILURES OF THE TWENTIES

Although in the decade from 1920 to 1930 Lewis was to produce his best novels, it was not a decade without its failure. Mantrap (1926), a novel based on a vacation which Lewis had taken with his brother Claude, represented a return to this commercialism of his early novels. Slick, labored, and melodramatic, it was obviously a novel by which Lewis utilized his now considerable reputation to gather, as he put it, “some easy gravy.” Lewis, however, quickly atoned for this retrogression with the publication of Elmer Gantry (1927), a violent study of religious fakery, and Dodsworth (1929), the sympathetic story of a man searching for fulfillment.

NOBEL PRIZE

In 1930, Sinclair Lewis was awarded the Nobel prize for literature. The first American ever to be so honored, he accepted the award proudly since the Nobel prize unlike the Pulitzer prize was not awarded for a single book, but for the entire body of his work. In his acceptance speech Lewis praised the work of fellow Americans, Theodore Dreiser, Thomas Wolfe, Thornton Wilder, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner, and had prophetically named two future winners of the award, Faulkner and Hemingway.

THE DECLINE OF AN AUTHOR

With the decade from 1920 to 1930 over, Lewis, at the zenith of his career, was never again to produce work of the quality of Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, or Dodsworth. For the next twenty years, however, he was to continue writing novels, short stories, plays, and book reviews, and in addition, he was to be active as a teacher, lecturer, producer, and actor. Among the more notable of the novels of this period are Ann Vickers (1933), It Can’t Happen Here (1935), Cass Timberlane (1945), and Kingsblood Royal (1947), all of which were either eventually produced on the State or made into movies.

PERSONAL LIFE

Although Lewis’ professional life was a long and successful one, his personal life was not. Married during the early years of his struggle for recognition as a writer to Grace Hegger (1914), Lewis was for a time idyllically happy. However, in 1925, because of Lewis’ growing irascibility, his addiction to alcohol, and the demands of his by now considerable fame as a writer, he and his wife separated and the marriage was terminated by divorce in 1928. Nor was his marriage to journalist Dorothy Thompson in 1928 to prove any more successful. From the beginning, Lewis’ drinking and the clash of their careers made it impossible for the marriage to be successful. And again as he had in his first marriage, Lewis separated from his wife in 1937, and was divorced in 1942. Not even the fact that he had a son by each wife made marriage tenable for him. For like his relationship with his own father, Lewis was never able to successfully communicate with his own children. The first son, Wells, was killed in World War II and his second, Michael, incurred his father’s displeasure by becoming an actor.

THE FINAL YEARS

During the last decade of his life, Lewis continued his tempestuous pace. Drinking heavily, and writing furiously, he formed a liaison with an actress considerably younger than himself, a relationship unfortunately no more satisfactory than his marriages had been. Finally in ill health and alone, he died in Rome on January 10, 1951, and his ashes were returned for burial to Sauk Centre where they were scattered over the fields of his birthplace. His last novel World So Wide was published posthumously later in that same year.

THE BACKGROUND OF BABBITT

Published in 1922, Babbitt was the first volume of what was later to be Sinclair Lewis’ Zenith trilogy (the other two volumes are Main Street and Arrowsmith). Following the critical satiric method which had made him famous with the publication of Main Street in 1920, Sinclair Lewis now explored metropolitan America as he had small towns; he brought “Main Street” to the big city. In Zenith, an imaginary city in an imaginary state, located somewhere in America’s Midwest, Lewis questioned through the medium of George F. Babbitt, a typical middle-class American businessman, the attitudes, values, and beliefs long cherished by the American middle class.

By 1922, America, largely untouched by World War I, had just entered what was to be the “roaring twenties.” It was the age of Warren G. Harding (1921 - 1923) and the return to “normalcy,” an age of unparalleled prosperity for many, an age of optimism and boosterism, an age that was to end in the catastrophic depression of 1929.

It was also an age of revolt. Not only had many Americans traveled more widely as the result of the war and the automobile, but new scientific discoveries, an awakening of interest in and the extension of education for greater numbers of Americans, and the sharp probing and questioning of America’s European expatriate writers had raised questions which were to challenge traditional American values. But here in Zenith, Lewis was to discover the last great bastion of conservative and traditional America still separated from the rest of the world geographically, morally, and intellectually; a stronghold of provincialism as yet safe from the rumblings of the flexible morality of the motor age, from the rootlessness of a mobile society, and as yet innocent of the complex nature of twentieth century existence.

As he had probed deeply small townism in Main Street, Lewis was to probe business ethics in Babbitt. Here insulated from the world, George F. Babbitt, like the numberless Babbitts of America, led a comfortable and secure existence, accepting almost without question, complacently, the vapid existence of the athletic club, the booster club, the lodge, the church social, and local culture society; and he remained only dimly aware of either the failure of the social order to provide adequately for all its citizens, or of the hypocrisy which was the essential characteristic of that order. Here the Babbitts of America lived blissfully unaware of the rise of Russian Communism, of Mussolini’s dictatorship in Italy, or of the radical rumblings in America.

Here in Zenith a society yet existed which could complacently measure progress in purely material terms. Not only were the public buildings larger, but inexpensive, if shoddy; housing developments were springing up in all quarters. The range of interest of the Babbitts of America was here restricted to the arguments concerning the relative merits of septic tanks and sewers; to automobiles, houses, garages, as the status symbols of the successful. Here in Zenith was a society adrift, a society which measured progress by personal gain, judged the value of religious institutions by the size of their Sunday schools, evaluated its educational institutions by the size and equipment of their buildings; and finally, whose cultural societies could be measured by the incoherence of their leaders.

What then Lewis laid bare in Babbitt was not so much a man as an age. Nor did he perform that dissection with violence, but with love. For though Lewis satirized, chided, and exposed, he retained a fondness for George F. Babbitt because Lewis like most Americans realized there is a little Babbitt in all Americans. Nor has the age of Babbittry entirely passed, for greed, stupidity, and the desire for status are characteristics not only of Americans of the nineteen twenties, but of mankind.

Although much of Lewis’ writing appears dated today because it appears to deal with a social order innocently remote from our own more sophisticated age, what Lewis contributed to American fiction with the writing of Main Street and Babbitt was a whole new subject matter for the novel. Although it is true that earlier novelists like Booth Tarkington, Frank Norris, and Jack London had explored economic America, none had explored it in such an individual, such a personal way. George F. Babbitt was not a special case, he was not an intelligent or sensitive man, alienated from his society, who regarded it from the heights and recorded its follies. George F. Babbitt was the common man, a participant in those folli...