Word: babbittism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Sinclair Lewis gave the world its classic picture of the American conformist. Whether he was known as Babbitt, Doc Kennicott, Joe Doakes or the great American boob, this monster was terrible, and to escape him (or his wife) the intellectuals of the 1920s fled from Main Street...
...Like Sinclair Lewis' books, Lower than Angels is remarkable for its accumulation of commonplace social history, and for its unsparing honesty. It is sometimes little more than a catalogue of impressions, saved from tedium and pretentiousness by Karig's humor. Marvin Lang has all the characteristics of Babbitt. He is smug, ambitious, self-righteous, calculating. Unlike Babbitt, he has a mean streak, especially in his relations with women. His life is actually harsher than Babbitt's was. But his enjoyment of his stale jokes is genuine; his faith in his secondhand opinions is profound; his comic-strip...
...their speechless comment on the life of their times. In Courthouse Square, revolving around a lynching, ana in Sun in Capricorn, about the rise of a worse Huey Long, Author Basso drew as bitter a picture of his native section as Sinclair Lewis drew in Main Street and Babbitt...
Says Lewis of his latest work: "This man Lewis is certainly going downhill fast. In each of his early books-Babbitt, Main Street, Elmer Gantry-there were one or two characters you could like. But in Gideon Planish everybody's a scoundrel...
Biographer of this modern Babbitt is Harry Brown, who was a member of the Harvard Class of 1938 and editor of the Advocate. Brown, however, is learning of the book's success via the trans-Atlantic cables as he is how with the London bureau of Yank...