Word: babbitts
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Civilized Barbarian. Sinclair Lewis' works have become period pieces. But in his prime, Lewis had no peer as a knocker of "homo Americanibus." Sinclair Lewis wrote mainly about one man, George Follansbee Babbitt, of Zenith, the Zip town. George Babbitt was a helpless materialist whose one standard was money, a quavering conformist whose only security was found in the back-slapping approval of his fellow Rotarians. He lived in physical comfort greater than kings enjoyed in the past, but he rarely stopped to enjoy it, for he was a Hustler. He was ashamed of his secret dreams...
Most of Lewis' novels are variations of Babbitt. Sam Dodsworth (who seems to improve with age) is an upper-class Babbitt with more dignity and deeper insights ("he sometimes enjoyed Beethoven"). Elmer Gantry is a Babbitt with a clerical collar and the courage of his disbelief; "Buzz" Windrip (the American dictator in It Can't Happen Here) is Babbitt running amuck with a submachine...
...great merit was that he gave the U.S. and the world a sense of the enduring strength (ugly or not) of Main Street; and that he made Americans on all main streets, including Babbitt, stop hustling long enough to wonder uneasily where they were going...
...Great Belch. Cried the hero of Lewis' second novel, Our Mr. Wrenn, a little Babbitt who managed to break out of his narrow life: "Let us be great lovers! Let us be mad! Let us stride over the hilltops!" Those were the sentiments on which Harry Sinclair Lewis, a doctor's son of New England ancestors, consciously patterned his life. He went to Yale, worked as janitor at Upton Sinclair's Socialist community of Helicon Hall in New Jersey, lived on rice in a California seaside cottage. In 1919, after publishing six conventional novels, all failures...
...must to most rebels, came to Red Lewis. He became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which he had derided and denounced. His home town graciously forgave his insults, made him its favorite prodigal son. In a world of storm troopers and commissars, George Babbittand Red Lewisdid not look like such bad fellows after all. In The Prodigal Parents, Babbitt (this time called Fred Cornplow) was finally canonized by his creator. Wrote Lewis: "He is the eternal bourgeois, the bourjoyce, the burgher . . . and when he changes his mind, that crisis is weightier...