Word: babbittism
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Religious Humanism-not to be confused with the philosophic "New" or "Literary" Humanism championed by Walter Lippmann, Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More some years ago-is considerably older than the First Humanist Society. In Minneapolis, Rev. John Hassler Dietrich, nominally Unitarian, has preached this non-supernatural faith for nearly 25 years. But the Manhattan society was founded and is run by one of the most articulate and ubiquitous of U. S. divines, Dr. Charles Francis Potter, onetime Baptist, onetime Unitarian, onetime Universalist. Long a popularizer of religion, in books and lectures, Dr. Potter is currently absorbed with the study...
...cool-headed doctor who not only wrote a medical classic on puerperal fever, but occasionally, as in Elsie Venner, anticipated Freud; the science popularizer whose Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table came nearer to Darwin than to the Transcendentalists; the author of The Professor, the awkward but potent anti-Calvinist Babbitt...
...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...