Word: babbittical
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...musical. The first act is a throwback to the old-fashioned football college comedy where education consists of numskull sessions and coeducation of necking sessions. The second (and last) act plunks a few blank cartridges into Madison Avenue, the most oversimplified U.S. symbol of evil since George F. Babbitt. To compound the sense of the archaic, the hero tumbles onstage with a planeload of European fellow immigrants to raise an Ellis-Islandish plea of ''melt us" before audiences that would rather be caught naked than stewing in the common pot of conformism...
Harry T. Levin '33, Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature, who is in charge of the Lectureship, said that after the film Bluestone would discuss movie-making, especially for students interested in film production...
Michael Redgrave's skillfully modulated performance unfolds a role to lay bare a man. In the early scenes, he is a British Babbitt, about as funny as a dentist's drill as he plays painful jokes with musical seat cushions and leaky glasses to the lonely giggle-gurgle of his own laughter. When he learns of his cuckolding, his face looks as deserted as a broken window. Fetching Googie Withers has eyes that flicker with the reflected firelight of romance, and her voice is a stolen kiss. As a kind of reformed cad, Richard Johnson is worldly wise...
...with the publication of Main Street. He was then 35, had published six novels and numerous short stories to mixed notices. But Main Street touched a contemporary nerve as no novel has done since. It sold furiously and was discussed endlessly. Within ten years, it was followed by Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry and Dodsworth. They brought Lewis wealth and world renown, both of which were cosmetics for an unattractive man. And in 1930 they brought him the Nobel Prize for literature, making Lewis the first American to win this International accolade...
Publishers of the Tropic, Grove Press Inc., Plan to have a Psychiatrist, an etymologist, and Harry T. Levin, Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature, appear in the book's defense...