Word: babbittical
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...year 1922 was a big year for modern literature. In that year appeared T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, Joyce's Ulysses, Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt, the first (English-translated) volume of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. The other literary landmark of that year was a startling encyclopedia, edited by Harold Stearns, called Civilization in the United States, the collective work of some 30 outspoken "young intellectuals," including such names as H.L. Mencken, Van Wyck Brooks, Lewis Mumford. The startling thing about the book was the contributors' pessimism. While the press, economists and politicians glorified...
...well handled, with motion pictures occupying many of the waits between the play's fifteen scenes. But audiences will forget the pink parachutes painted over the Kremlin, they will forget the startling beauty of the chorines, and they may even forget the tunes. Yet the portrait of a new Babbitt, from Topeka, Kansas, who likes nothing better than pitching horseshoes with the boys, will remain in their minds as a tribute to Mr. Moore and a charming conception of true Americanism...
Last week What People Said, a 614-page, dramatic first novel, laid in imaginary Athena, Oklarada. offered the first work of fiction to tempt comparison with Middletown in Transition. On the surface Author White's Main Street still looks much as it did in Main Street and Babbitt. Like Sinclair Lewis. Author White gives no solution for Main Street's inhibiting culture, offers no antagonist capable of creating a better one. But Author White's novel carries an undercurrent, nowhere found in Lewis' books, of those acute undersurface tensions detected by the Lynds...
...adopts toward the Communist Party and for its sympathetic portrait of the type of U. S. businessman Lewis has previously satirized. The story revolves around the rebellion of Frederick William Cornplow, a plump, prosperous, middle-aged automobile dealer of Sachem Falls, N. Y., who is a dead ringer for Babbitt...
...unlike Babbitt, Fred Cornplow is harassed by two extraordinarily rude, extravagant, self-centred children who almost drive him crazy and then try to lock him in a sanitarium so he can recover the mental balance they have destroyed. Son Howard is a handsome, stupid, unprincipled college boy who is always borrowing money, wrecking his father's cars, and trying to lie his way out. Daughter Sara is a handsome, ill-natured poseur who becomes a Communist, falls in love with an agitator, overdraws her allowance of $1,000 a year and spends most of her time making poisonous remarks...