Word: babbittism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...sale, was strong and simple. Yet it is some of the most beautiful furniture ever produced in the U.S. Their solid brick houses and great barns also have an austere beauty. Though Shakers had little use for book-learning, they were inventors. In an ecstatic vision, Shaker Sister Sarah Babbitt invented the buzz saw. Shakers are credited with inventing the one-horse shay. At a time when the quality of garden seeds was poor, Shakers gained a virtual monopoly of the seed business by the purity and vitality of their seeds...
...Those eyes welcomed him as a prosperous bestseller, and with a few ragged introductions, the self-invited guests started pushing tables together. The saucers recording the prices of the drinks rose higher & higher, and so did the comments on the shameful commercialism of writing books like Main Street and Babbitt. Mr. Lewis was extraordinarily patient, but finally called for the bill-suddenly all chairs but two were empty...
...radio and Sunday newspaper comic section ads, have heralded the postwar return of "premiums," the somewhat mysterious business in which everything from atomic rings to nylon stockings can be bought at cut prices with the proper number of box tops, soap wrappers, etc. Ever since 1851, when Benjamin Talbot Babbitt, the father of packaged soap, got the idea of offering sentimental chromos for 25 Babbitt's Best Soap wrappers, premiums have helped sell thousands of items...
...instructor and student was beginning to supplant the old one, in which professors were in the main people apart." Another undoubtedly invigorating circumstance was the fact of having Harold Laski for a tutor for three years. "Since I was influenced strongly and simultaneously by Laski and by Irvin Babbitt, who with his theories of 'inner cheeks' you might call Conservative, a tug of war ensued in me. It ended with my becoming what some people have called a fence sitter...
Sinclair Lewis, whose last try at movie writing was an anti-fascist horse opera (junked as "bad box office"), was back for another try-this time a satire on Adam & Eve. Two days after he hit Hollywood, Babbitt's aging creator: 1) went to a big party at Gossipist Hedda Hopper's, 2) talked like a native. "The movies are no more commercial," declared Lewis, "than any other form of art. . . . There's no reason to suppose that a poor man starving in a garret writes better than a rich man living in a mansion. . . . Human beings...