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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Babbitt," Sinclair Lewis crafts a scathing satire of American middle-class life in the 1920s, encapsulating the era's social mores through the experiences of George F. Babbitt, a prosperous yet unfulfilled real estate agent. The novel employs a sharp, ironic tone and vivid imagery to explore themes such as conformity, materialism, and the quest for individual identity amidst societal expectations. Lewis's keen observations mirror the disillusionment of post-World War I America, positioning Babbitt as a quintessential representation of the vacuity often masked by the American Dream. Sinclair Lewis, the first American to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, was known for his incisive critiques of American culture. His own experiences growing up in the Midwest informed his depictions of small-town life and its attendant struggles. Through Babbitt, he sought to expose the hollowness of commercial success and the dangers of unchecked ambition, drawing upon the socio-political context of the 1920s to amplify his message. "Babbitt" remains a relevant exploration for contemporary readers grappling with similar issues of conformity and fulfillment in a consumer-driven society. Its enduring relevance makes it a necessary read for anyone interested in understanding the complexities of American identity and the societal pressures that shape individual lives. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Babbitt
Table of Contents
Introduction
In Babbitt, the bright buzz of boosterism muffles a single citizen’s uneasy conscience, as success, status, and belonging pull against the stubborn urge to ask what any of it finally means.
Babbitt holds its classic status because it distilled, with uncommon clarity and humor, a distinctly American tension between social conformity and private desire. Sinclair Lewis’s portrait of a prosperous, bustling middle class has remained a touchstone for readers, critics, and teachers for over a century. The novel’s title even entered the language as shorthand for complacent respectability, a sign of its cultural reach. Its satire is spacious rather than cruel, allowing us to recognize ourselves in the very behaviors it lampoons. That durable recognition—at once amusing and unsettling—helps explain why the book endures in classrooms and conversations about American identity.
Written by Sinclair Lewis and first published in 1922, Babbitt follows George F. Babbitt, a successful real estate broker in the fictional Midwestern city of Zenith, located in the invented state of Winnemac. The book observes his daily routines, professional ambitions, social rituals, and the civic boosterism that defines his world. Lewis’s purpose is not to recount a sensational adventure but to anatomize a culture: the sales talk, the committees, the clubs, and the cultivated optimism that shape a certain American life. Without revealing later developments, it is enough to say that the novel probes how personal yearnings press against a powerful, reassuring social order.
The novel emerges from the ferment of early 1920s America: postwar prosperity, rapid urban growth, expanding consumer markets, and the rhetoric of progress that animated chambers of commerce across the country. Advertising was becoming an art and a science, and professional organizations translated civic pride into measurable goals. Babbitt’s world reflects those forces—new technologies, new suburbs, new habits of leisure and consumption—filtered through a civic gospel of busyness and success. In giving that gospel a voice and a rhythm, Lewis captured a historical moment without reducing it to mere reportage. The book’s realism feels lived-in, yet its concerns reach beyond the particulars of its decade.
Babbitt influenced literary treatments of American middle-class life by demonstrating how satire could coexist with social observation and psychological nuance. While not responsible for every later suburban narrative, it helped establish a template for examining status anxiety, neighborhood rituals, and the marketplace of identities. Writers exploring commuter towns, corporate careers, and the managed self found a precedent in Lewis’s method: look closely, listen to public language, and disclose what that language masks. The novel also affected criticism and journalism; to call someone a babbitt became a pointed shorthand. That linguistic afterlife signals a book whose insight traveled beyond literature into public discourse.
Lewis’s style mixes close observation with comic exaggeration, reproducing the tics, slogans, and pep of civic speech while allowing readers to sense what lies beneath. The narrative often keeps near Babbitt’s perspective, inviting us to inhabit his enthusiasms and anxieties rather than simply judge them from afar. Catalogs of products, titles, and committees sketch a social ecosystem defined by measurement and momentum. Irony animates the pages, but so does sympathy; the satire never fully abandons the humanity of its subject. This blend of mockery and care gives the book tonal complexity, sustaining its readability and deepening its critique of the pressures that make certain performances feel compulsory.
At the novel’s center stands George F. Babbitt, prosperous, energetic, and attentive to the smallest signals of status. He takes pride in his work, cultivates connections, and embraces the rituals that confirm his place among peers. Family, office, and civic organizations form a triangle of expectations that define his days. Around him, colleagues, neighbors, and clubmates provide a chorus of encouragement and constraint. Zenith itself functions almost like a character: modern, efficient, and proud of its promise. Through this web of relationships and routines, Lewis assembles a portrait of a man and a milieu, revealing how ordinary life can become a theater of aspiration and reassurance.
The themes that run through Babbitt are enduring: conformity and individual conscience, the allure and anxiety of success, the interplay of public performance and private doubt. The novel interrogates the American Dream not by denouncing it outright but by showing how its rewards can thicken into obligations, and how its language can crowd out quieter measures of meaning. It considers friendship and belonging as both shelter and pressure. It questions whether prosperity automatically yields fulfillment, and what kind of courage it might take to revise one’s own story. These concerns are not confined to a decade; they are part of modern life’s ongoing negotiation.
Upon publication, Babbitt was widely read and widely debated. Its brisk sales and vigorous conversation cemented Lewis’s reputation as a leading observer of American manners. Admirers praised the sharp ear and fearless satire; detractors bristled at what they saw as an unflattering mirror. Either way, the book provoked recognition. The name Babbitt quickly migrated into reviews, essays, and everyday speech, evidence of how thoroughly the novel mapped a recognizable type. The combination of popular reach and critical attention is a hallmark of a classic, and in this case it helped elevate Lewis to lasting prominence on both sides of the Atlantic.
Contemporary readers will find in Babbitt a surprisingly modern exploration of branding, networking, and curated selves. Its business lunches and civic campaigns anticipate today’s performance of success on new platforms. The pressures to keep up, to remain visible, and to translate feeling into marketable language are everywhere in the book, as they are in current life. Yet it also offers humor, energy, and the comforts of recognition. Readers can enjoy the comedy of manners while engaging the sobering question at its core: what is the cost of fitting in so well that one’s truest impulses struggle to be heard?
This introduction invites you to notice how the novel’s details do their quiet work: the cadence of sales talk, the choreography of meetings, the satisfactions of smooth routines. Watch how the city frames choices, how social approval shapes speech, and how small hesitations acquire significance. The book rewards patient attention to tone, to the gap between what is said and what is felt. Its satire is not a closed indictment but an open inquiry. By reading with both amusement and sympathy, you will encounter a work that entertains while nudging reflection, allowing the comedy to deepen into something more searching.
Babbitt remains compelling because it captures a permanent human puzzle within a distinctly American setting: how to balance belonging and belief, prosperity and purpose. It is a landmark of social satire whose language and insights have entered common understanding. Alongside earlier successes and later works, it helped earn Sinclair Lewis the 1930 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first awarded to an American, recognizing the breadth of his social vision. Its main ideas—identity, ambition, conformity, and conscience—retain their urgency. For readers today, the novel offers a lively narrative and a mirror, inviting both historical curiosity and personal reckoning.
Synopsis
Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt follows George F. Babbitt, a successful real estate broker in the midwestern city of Zenith during the early 1920s. The novel opens with his brisk morning routines, the comforts of his modern home, and the reassuring hum of a city devoted to progress. Babbitt’s world is one of automobiles, gadgets, and civic pride, where efficiency and salesmanship are prized. He is confident, gregarious, and proud of his status, yet faintly uneasy, sensing that his life is carefully arranged by the expectations of his class and city. This introduction anchors the story in a bustling, boosterish American milieu.
At work, Babbitt thrives by mastering the language of promotion and public spirit. He courts clients, cultivates colleagues, and perfects the persuasive slogans that sell houses and neighborhoods. He attends business lunches, joins committees, and endorses initiatives that promise development. Zenith’s elite networks, including clubs and church groups, provide both camaraderie and leverage. In this setting, business and civic loyalty are intertwined. Deals are presented as community service, and personal advancement as a contribution to public welfare. Babbitt’s enthusiasm for standardized tastes and polished surfaces reflects a city eager to grow, and a man who sees success as an endorsement of his values.
Babbitt’s domestic life in Floral Heights mirrors his professional orderliness. His wife, Myra, oversees a comfortable home that showcases the latest conveniences, while their children navigate school, courtship, and new social fashions. Family dinners, evenings with friends, and weekend rituals affirm the stability of their world. Yet small frictions surface. His son’s independence, his daughter’s ambitions, and his own moments of restlessness hint at a gap between the life he has and the life he imagines. He experiences vague longings for romance and adventure, daydreams of a more spirited existence, and questions whether his routines satisfy his deeper desires.
Babbitt’s closest friend, Paul Riesling, becomes a confidant for these private doubts. The two men share frustrations with the pressure to conform and an eagerness to recapture youthful vigor. A vacation in the Maine woods offers a concentrated experience of release, with frank talk, quiet landscapes, and freedom from social obligations. The contrast between the wilderness and Zenith’s schedules intensifies their introspection. Returning to the city, both feel the pull of duty and habit, but the memory of escape lingers. This interlude marks a subtle turning point: Babbitt’s underlying dissatisfaction becomes more persistent and more difficult to dismiss.
As Paul’s private struggles deepen, Babbitt confronts the limits of his community’s tolerance. An episode of personal crisis for his friend brings public consequences, and the institutions that once seemed benevolent reveal their rigidity. Business acquaintances weigh loyalty against reputation, and whispered judgments replace earlier camaraderie. Babbitt’s sympathy for Paul exposes fault lines in his own beliefs about success, morality, and authority. He begins to recognize how the demand for conformity can overshadow compassion. The fallout unsettles him, stirring an urge to change. Without resolving his doubts, he starts to question which allegiances are genuine and which are protective masks.
Babbitt’s questioning leads him to experiment beyond his usual circles. He mingles with artists, professionals, and casual acquaintances who critique the city’s booster spirit. He attends different gatherings, explores nighttime amusements, and voices opinions at odds with his longtime peers. A romantic entanglement, never fully defined, underscores his desire to live more freely. He tests the rules around propriety, Prohibition, and politics, savoring moments of independence and the thrill of speaking his mind. Yet these adventures carry risks. He senses that the acceptance he once took for granted may depend on him maintaining a familiar posture and abstaining from dissent.
City politics intensify the pressures. Labor disputes and local elections pit established business interests against reformers, drawing lines that reach into every office and club. Babbitt’s tentative openness to new ideas places him under scrutiny. Clients waver, fellow boosters frown, and newspapers echo the call for unity. He discovers how quickly influence and opportunity can evaporate when one strays from approved positions. The public rhetoric of freedom contrasts with private demands for discipline. At this juncture, Babbitt’s impulses toward individuality collide with the practical costs of alienation, forcing him to weigh personal conviction against professional security and social standing.
The tensions spread to the home, where responsibilities sharpen choice. Myra’s needs, the children’s paths, and the ongoing demands of comfort and respectability require attention. Babbitt is pulled between protecting his family’s stability and following a more uncertain, self-directed course. Invitations, business calls, and neighborhood expectations press him to reaffirm old loyalties. The allure of independence remains, but the consequences grow clearer and closer. As domestic events accumulate, he must decide what kind of husband, father, and citizen he wishes to be. The narrative gathers its threads into a moment that tests his self-image without revealing its final resolution.
Babbitt presents an unfolding portrait of American middle-class life as modern consumer culture and civic boosterism reshape daily experience. The story follows a man who embodies his era’s confidence, then encounters the limits of that ideal. Without prescribing answers, the novel traces the push and pull between individual desire and social order, prosperity and purpose, conformity and risk. Through Zenith’s offices, parlors, and streets, it maps the textures of ambition, comfort, and unease. The arc remains accessible and clear, highlighting key turns while withholding crucial outcomes. Its central message examines how identity is negotiated within a community built on growth and approval.
Historical Context
Sinclair Lewis sets Babbitt in the early 1920s, in the fictional Midwestern city of Zenith, within the equally fictional state of Winnemac. Zenith mirrors real industrial metropolises such as Minneapolis–St. Paul, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Milwaukee, where manufacturing, retail, and the rising service sector reshaped daily life. The 1920 U.S. Census marked the first time the nation was majority urban, and Zenith reflects that demographic shift: streetcar suburbs give way to automobile neighborhoods like Floral Heights, while telephones, electrification, and office buildings transform work and home. The city’s geography, commuter patterns, and social stratification create a credible environment for middle-class ambition and anxiety.
The novel’s temporal frame follows post–World War I dislocation, the 1920–1921 recession, and the resurgence of business optimism that political leaders called normalcy. Prohibition takes effect in 1920, shadowing public morality with private evasion. Civic clubs, chambers of commerce, and professional associations consolidate influence, while national markets, chain stores, and installment credit expand consumer reach. The period’s social currents include suspicion of radicalism, reorganized labor relations, and debates over women’s roles after the 19th Amendment. Against this backdrop, Zenith appears as a composite of booster rhetoric and standardized habits, a place where technology seems to promise freedom, yet conformity and status anxiety govern behavior.
A defining event for the novel’s world is the 1920s real estate boom. Building and loan associations, urban plats, and speculative subdivisions multiplied as cities pushed outward. The National Association of Real Estate Boards, founded in 1908, promoted professional standards and a national market for property. By the mid-1920s, frenzies such as the Florida land boom (peaking 1925–1926) dramatized the decade’s speculative spirit. Even prior to that peak, metropolitan regions from the Great Lakes to the Plains saw housing construction surge and suburban tracts proliferate. Babbitt, a realty broker, embodies this property culture: his salesmanship, ethics, and status are inseparable from a market that prizes expansion over community.
Urban boosterism and civic clubs powered local economic growth strategies. Chambers of commerce rallied business leaders, while Rotary International (founded 1905 in Chicago) and Kiwanis (1915 in Detroit) spread a creed of service tied to deal-making and networking. Cities staged industrial parades, hosted conventions, and publicized plant openings to attract investment. The older City Beautiful movement influenced 1910s–1920s plans for parks, boulevards, and civic centers, often aligned with commercial interests. In the novel, Zenith’s clubs function as gatekeepers of respectability and opportunity. Babbitt’s routine lunches, speeches, and committee work dramatize how booster rhetoric becomes a social obligation and a mechanism of informal political control.
Zoning and restrictive covenants institutionalized the 1920s suburban order. New York City’s 1916 Zoning Resolution pioneered use segregation and height districts; Herbert Hoover’s Commerce Department issued the Standard State Zoning Enabling Act in 1922 to normalize such laws nationwide. The Supreme Court upheld comprehensive zoning in Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co. (1926). Although Buchanan v. Warley (1917) struck down racial zoning, courts permitted private racial covenants, as in Corrigan v. Buckley (1926). These tools separated land uses, protected property values, and enforced racial and class lines. Babbitt’s prized neighborhoods and guarded exclusivity mirror how policy and private contracts shaped who belonged where.
The postwar consumer economy accelerated in the 1920s, as national brands, chain stores, and installment buying spread new goods to middle-class homes. Household appliances, radios, and phonographs joined standardized furniture and fashions, while department stores innovated display and credit strategies. Advertising budgets rose with magazine circulation, and catalog retail extended metropolitan tastes into smaller cities. Economic growth after the 1920–1921 slump fueled confidence through mid-decade, intertwining identity with consumption. In the novel, material acquisitions and brand consciousness signal status and belonging. Babbitt’s household comforts, gadgets, and desire for the newest conveniences exemplify how consumption became not just a habit but a civic creed.
Advertising and salesmanship professionalized swiftly in the 1910s and 1920s. The American Association of Advertising Agencies formed in 1917, while the Association of National Advertisers and trade journals such as Printers' Ink promoted standards, research, and truth-in-advertising statutes. Pioneers like Edward Bernays popularized applied psychology to shape public opinion, as in his 1922 tract. Sales conventions, motivational talks, and market surveys turned persuasion into a science. This commercial rhetoric saturated civic life, equating business success with public virtue. Babbitt’s patter, slogans, and booster clichés draw from this milieu. The novel’s dialogue echoes an era when marketing language colonized politics, religion, and private aspiration.
Automobiles remade American space and time. Ford’s Model T, produced from 1908 to 1927, put more than 15 million cars on the road, while the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1921 funded state systems that linked towns into metropolitan webs. The Good Roads movement, gasoline stations, garages, and traffic ordinances reorganized cities around driving. New retail strips, billboards, and roadside amusements followed. Cars enabled suburban residence with downtown employment and turned commuting into a defining daily ritual. In Babbitt, the automobile is status object, freedom machine, and time-discipline tool. Zenith’s social geography—clubs, offices, and floral suburbs—depends on the car and its cultural meanings.
Prohibition reshaped public behavior and law. The 18th Amendment, ratified in 1919, and the Volstead Act (1919) took effect in January 1920, banning manufacture and sale of intoxicating beverages. Enforcement created new federal powers and illicit markets, from small-time bootleggers to organized syndicates, while speakeasies became social venues. Regional and class divisions in enforcement bred cynicism toward authority. Dry crusaders linked abstinence to patriotism and productivity; wet opponents cited personal liberty and the failings of enforcement. Babbitt’s clandestine drinking and social maneuvering evoke the double life of respectable citizens under Prohibition, revealing a gap between public piety and private practice.
The First Red Scare (1919–1920) fused wartime nationalism, labor unrest, and fear of Bolshevism. Mail bombs in 1919, the Seattle General Strike, the Boston Police Strike, and the national steel strike prompted Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s raids, overseen by J. Edgar Hoover’s General Intelligence Division. Thousands were arrested; hundreds, including Emma Goldman, were deported on the USS Buford in December 1919. Veterans’ groups and local committees promoted 100 percent Americanism. In Babbitt, civic watchdogs and employers’ circles police dissent and liberal flirtations, pressuring conformity. The atmosphere of suspicion explains why social deviation carries professional risks and why middle-class men enforce orthodoxy on peers.
Labor conflict defined the period. The 1919 Great Steel Strike involved more than 350,000 workers; in 1922, the Railroad Shopmen’s Strike disrupted transport and provoked injunctions and violence. Employers advanced the open shop American Plan, backed by groups like the National Association of Manufacturers and local Citizens’ Alliances. The 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain in West Virginia, the largest labor uprising since the Civil War, dramatized the stakes. Courts and federal agencies often sided with managerial order. In Babbitt’s world, unions are suspect and industrial peace equates to business control. The novel mirrors the era’s civic consensus that equated labor activism with disloyalty.
Women’s suffrage and changing gender norms recalibrated public life. The 19th Amendment, ratified on August 18, 1920, expanded the electorate; organizations like the League of Women Voters pressed for civic education. Congress passed the Sheppard–Towner Maternity and Infancy Act in 1921, an early federal welfare measure. Offices and shops absorbed more women workers; youth culture celebrated bobbed hair, shorter skirts, and new leisure habits. Debates over marriage, divorce, and professional identity intensified. In Babbitt, household and generational tensions reflect these transitions. The aspirations and constraints of middle-class wives and daughters mirror national arguments about autonomy, respectability, and the boundaries of domestic authority.
Pro-business politics dominated Washington. Warren G. Harding, inaugurated in 1921, championed normalcy; his Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon pursued tax reductions in 1921 and 1924 to favor investment. Regulatory agencies grew more conciliatory, while trade associations worked with the Commerce Department on standards. The Teapot Dome scandal (1921–1923) exposed secret leasing of naval oil reserves by Interior Secretary Albert B. Fall to companies led by Harry F. Sinclair and Edward L. Doheny; Senate investigations unfolded in 1923–1924. Calvin Coolidge, who succeeded Harding in 1923, identified national prosperity with business leadership. Babbitt’s reverence for businessmen and civic elites reflects these policy signals and their cultural authority.
The Great Migration reshaped northern cities. From 1916 to 1930, more than a million African Americans left the South for industrial jobs in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and other centers, intensifying housing competition and altering politics. Racial tensions flared in the 1919 Red Summer, including the Chicago race riot. Restrictive covenants, exclusionary zoning strategies, and discriminatory lending confined Black residents to segregated districts. While Zenith is largely depicted as white middle-class space, its guarded neighborhoods and anxieties about property values echo this national reorganization. The novel’s silence and euphemisms about race track a broader pattern of segregation operating through real estate practice and civic custom.
Nativism and the second Ku Klux Klan surged in the 1920s. Reborn in 1915, the Klan grew to several million members by mid-decade, wielding influence in states like Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan. It promoted Protestant moralism, Prohibition enforcement, and hostility to Catholics, Jews, immigrants, and African Americans. Scandals, notably the D. C. Stephenson case in 1925, hastened its decline. Simultaneously, the 1921 Emergency Quota Act and the 1924 Johnson–Reed Act imposed national-origin quotas, recasting immigration policy. Babbitt’s civic vigilantism, conformity pressure, and coded prejudices evoke the temper of 100 percent Americanism, even when the novel does not name specific organizations.
The book functions as a social indictment of middle-class conformity yoked to commercial values. It exposes how booster rhetoric, club life, and professional etiquette police the boundaries of speech and association, masking coercion as civic spirit. Prohibition’s stage-managed morality reveals a regime where public virtue coexists with private evasion, while the celebration of efficiency justifies indifference to inequality. Babbitt’s career illustrates how speculative real estate orders city space, privileging property values over community and fairness. The novel’s portrait of status anxiety, peer surveillance, and ritualized optimism reveals a culture that confuses prosperity signs with ethical substance.
Politically, the narrative scrutinizes the close alignment of business interests with local governance and national policy in the early 1920s. Club networks act as informal parties that reward loyalty, punish dissent, and define citizenship through purchasing power and etiquette. Anti-radical campaigns chill debate; immigration restriction and exclusionary housing constrain belonging; and labor is treated as a problem of control, not justice. By dramatizing these pressures in a single city, the book shows how democratic forms can be captured by market ideology. The tension between individual longing and institutional enforcement becomes the era’s central civic conflict, and Babbitt’s compromises make that conflict legible.
Author Biography
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) was an American novelist and social satirist whose work dissected the manners, ambitions, and anxieties of modern U.S. life. In 1930 he became the first American to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, a recognition of his vigorous prose and unflinching portraits of middle-class culture. Across novels that span the 1910s through the 1940s, he explored small-town provincialism, commercial boosterism, professional ethics, and religious showmanship. Books such as Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, Dodsworth, and It Can’t Happen Here brought him wide readership, notoriety, and debate, making his name synonymous with candid, satirical examinations of American institutions.
Lewis grew up in the Upper Midwest and carried its landscapes and social textures into his fiction. He studied at Yale University in the early 1900s, contributing to student publications and honing a brisk, observational style that served him as a reporter and editor after graduation. Early professional years in publishing and journalism helped him master popular idioms and narrative pacing. He read widely in European and American realism and followed Progressive Era journalism, influences that sharpened his appetite for social critique. The combination of regional familiarity and broad literary models shaped the voice that would become one of the era’s most recognizable.
Before his major success, Lewis produced stories and modest novels while learning the trade of commercial writing. Free Air, a road novel published in the late 1910s, presaged his interest in mobility and class in a changing nation. His breakthrough arrived with Main Street (1920), a sharp portrayal of a Midwestern town’s conformist pressures and guarded routines. The book became a sensation, praised for its comic bite and closely observed detail, and attacked for perceived unfairness to small-town life. Its notoriety made Lewis a national figure and established the template for his enduring mixture of satire, reportage, and social anatomy.
Babbitt (1922) extended his scrutiny to urban business culture, following a real estate salesman whose speech, habits, and ambitions epitomized civic boosterism. The word “Babbitt” quickly entered public discourse as shorthand for complacent conformity. Arrowsmith (1925) shifted focus to the medical profession, charting a scientist’s conflicts with institutions and commercial pressures. In crafting its laboratory scenes and professional debates, Lewis drew on expert guidance to capture the tensions between research ideals and pragmatic compromise. The novel’s distinction was underscored when a Pulitzer Prize was awarded to it; Lewis declined the honor, asserting reservations about prizes and the constraints they might place on literature.
Elmer Gantry (1927) intensified his critique by targeting revivalist showmanship and the lucrative intertwining of piety and publicity, provoking controversy while demonstrating his flair for theatrical characterization. With Dodsworth (1929), he followed an industrialist abroad, using travel to contrast American habits with European cultures and to probe the costs of success. In 1930 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, lauded for energetic narrative and a capacity to create types that illuminated national character. In public remarks around the award, he urged American writers toward fearless examination of their society, aligning his own practice with a broader argument for intellectual independence.
Responding to the political crises of the 1930s, Lewis wrote It Can’t Happen Here (1935), imagining authoritarianism’s rise within the United States. Its stage adaptation was mounted widely by the Federal Theatre Project, bringing his cautionary tale to audiences across the country. He continued to publish socially engaged novels, including Ann Vickers (1933), The Man Who Knew Coolidge (late 1920s), Gideon Planish (1943), Cass Timberlane (1945), and Kingsblood Royal (1947), the last confronting racial prejudice and identity. Though critical reception varied, several works reached large audiences and were adapted for stage or screen. He also lectured extensively, defending artistic candor and civic debate.
Lewis’s later years mixed sustained productivity with uneven reviews and personal difficulties, including struggles with alcohol. He remained active as a novelist and public speaker into the late 1940s and died in 1951 while abroad. His legacy endures in the language—“Babbitt,” “babbittry,” and the warning embedded in It Can’t Happen Here—and in a critical method that fused sociological observation with comic exaggeration. Read today, his work offers a historical record of early twentieth-century American aspirations and anxieties, while inviting renewed discussion about conformity, professionalism, and civic courage. He stands as a central figure in the evolution of American social realism and satire.
Babbitt
CHAPTER I
I
The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. They were neither citadels nor churches, but frankly and beautifully office-buildings.
The mist took pity on the fretted structures of earlier generations: the Post Office with its shingle-tortured mansard, the red brick minarets of hulking old houses, factories with stingy and sooted windows, wooden tenements colored like mud. The city was full of such grotesqueries, but the clean towers were thrusting them from the business center, and on the farther hills were shining new houses, homes — they seemed — for laughter and tranquillity.
Over a concrete bridge fled a limousine of long sleek hood and noiseless engine. These people in evening clothes were returning from an all-night rehearsal of a Little Theater[1] play, an artistic adventure considerably illuminated by champagne. Below the bridge curved a railroad, a maze of green and crimson lights. The New York Flyer boomed past, and twenty lines of polished steel leaped into the glare.
In one of the skyscrapers the wires of the Associated Press were closing down. The telegraph operators wearily raised their celluloid eye-shades after a night of talking with Paris and Peking. Through the building crawled the scrubwomen, yawning, their old shoes slapping. The dawn mist spun away. Cues of men with lunch-boxes clumped toward the immensity of new factories, sheets of glass and hollow tile, glittering shops where five thousand men worked beneath one roof, pouring out the honest wares that would be sold up the Euphrates and across the veldt. The whistles rolled out in greeting a chorus cheerful as the April dawn; the song of labor in a city built — it seemed — for giants.
II
There was nothing of the giant in the aspect of the man who was beginning to awaken on the sleeping-porch of a Dutch Colonial house in that residential district of Zenith known as Floral Heights.
His name was George F. Babbitt. He was forty-six years old now, in April, 1920, and he made nothing in particular, neither butter nor shoes nor poetry, but he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.
His large head was pink, his brown hair thin and dry. His face was babyish in slumber, despite his wrinkles and the red spectacle-dents on the slopes of his nose. He was not fat but he was exceedingly well fed; his cheeks were pads, and the unroughened hand which lay helpless upon the khaki-colored blanket was slightly puffy. He seemed prosperous, extremely married and unromantic[1q]; and altogether unromantic appeared this sleeping-porch, which looked on one sizable elm, two respectable grass-plots, a cement driveway, and a corrugated iron garage. Yet Babbitt was again dreaming of the fairy child, a dream more romantic than scarlet pagodas by a silver sea.
For years the fairy child had come to him. Where others saw but Georgie Babbitt, she discerned gallant youth. She waited for him, in the darkness beyond mysterious groves. When at last he could slip away from the crowded house he darted to her. His wife, his clamoring friends, sought to follow, but he escaped, the girl fleet beside him, and they crouched together on a shadowy hillside. She was so slim, so white, so eager! She cried that he was gay and valiant, that she would wait for him, that they would sail —
Rumble and bang of the milk-truck.
Babbitt moaned; turned over; struggled back toward his dream. He could see only her face now, beyond misty waters. The furnace-man slammed the basement door. A dog barked in the next yard. As Babbitt sank blissfully into a dim warm tide, the paper-carrier went by whistling, and the rolled-up Advocate thumped the front door. Babbitt roused, his stomach constricted with alarm. As he relaxed, he was pierced by the familiar and irritating rattle of some one cranking a Ford: snap-ah-ah, snap-ah-ah, snap-ah-ah. Himself a pious motorist, Babbitt cranked with the unseen driver, with him waited through taut hours for the roar of the starting engine, with him agonized as the roar ceased and again began the infernal patient snap-ah-ah — a round, flat sound, a shivering cold-morning sound, a sound infuriating and inescapable. Not till the rising voice of the motor told him that the Ford was moving was he released from the panting tension. He glanced once at his favorite tree, elm twigs against the gold patina of sky, and fumbled for sleep as for a drug. He who had been a boy very credulous of life was no longer greatly interested in the possible and improbable adventures of each new day.
He escaped from reality till the alarm-clock rang, at seven-twenty.
III
It was the best of nationally advertised and quantitatively produced alarm-clocks, with all modern attachments, including cathedral chime, intermittent alarm, and a phosphorescent dial. Babbitt was proud of being awakened by such a rich device. Socially it was almost as creditable as buying expensive cord tires.
He sulkily admitted now that there was no more escape, but he lay and detested the grind of the real-estate business, and disliked his family, and disliked himself for disliking them. The evening before, he had played poker at Vergil Gunch's till midnight, and after such holidays he was irritable before breakfast. It may have been the tremendous home-brewed beer of the prohibition-era and the cigars to which that beer enticed him; it may have been resentment of return from this fine, bold man-world to a restricted region of wives and stenographers, and of suggestions not to smoke so much.
From the bedroom beside the sleeping-porch, his wife's detestably cheerful “Time to get up, Georgie boy,” and the itchy sound, the brisk and scratchy sound, of combing hairs out of a stiff brush.
He grunted; he dragged his thick legs, in faded baby-blue pajamas, from under the khaki blanket; he sat on the edge of the cot, running his fingers through his wild hair, while his plump feet mechanically felt for his slippers. He looked regretfully at the blanket — forever a suggestion to him of freedom and heroism. He had bought it for a camping trip which had never come off. It symbolized gorgeous loafing, gorgeous cursing, virile flannel shirts.
He creaked to his feet, groaning at the waves of pain which passed behind his eyeballs. Though he waited for their scorching recurrence, he looked blurrily out at the yard. It delighted him, as always; it was the neat yard of a successful business man of Zenith, that is, it was perfection, and made him also perfect. He regarded the corrugated iron garage. For the three-hundred-and-sixty-fifth time in a year he reflected, “No class to that tin shack. Have to build me a frame garage. But by golly it's the only thing on the place that isn't up-to-date!” While he stared he thought of a community garage for his acreage development, Glen Oriole. He stopped puffing and jiggling. His arms were akimbo. His petulant, sleep-swollen face was set in harder lines. He suddenly seemed capable, an official, a man to contrive, to direct, to get things done.
On the vigor of his idea he was carried down the hard, clean, unused-looking hall into the bathroom.
Though the house was not large it had, like all houses on Floral Heights, an altogether royal bathroom of porcelain and glazed tile and metal sleek as silver. The towel-rack was a rod of clear glass set in nickel. The tub was long enough for a Prussian Guard, and above the set bowl was a sensational exhibit of tooth-brush holder, shaving-brush holder, soap-dish, sponge-dish, and medicine-cabinet, so glittering and so ingenious that they resembled an electrical instrument-board. But the Babbitt whose god was Modern Appliances was not pleased. The air of the bathroom was thick with the smell of a heathen toothpaste. “Verona been at it again! 'Stead of sticking to Lilidol, like I've re-peat-ed-ly asked her, she's gone and gotten some confounded stinkum stuff that makes you sick!”
The bath-mat was wrinkled and the floor was wet. (His daughter Verona eccentrically took baths in the morning, now and then.) He slipped on the mat, and slid against the tub. He said “Damn!” Furiously he snatched up his tube of shaving-cream, furiously he lathered, with a belligerent slapping of the unctuous brush, furiously he raked his plump cheeks with a safety-razor. It pulled. The blade was dull. He said, “Damn — oh — oh — damn it!”
He hunted through the medicine-cabinet for a packet of new razor-blades (reflecting, as invariably, “Be cheaper to buy one of these dinguses and strop your own blades,”) and when he discovered the packet, behind the round box of bicarbonate of soda, he thought ill of his wife for putting it there and very well of himself for not saying “Damn.” But he did say it, immediately afterward, when with wet and soap-slippery fingers he tried to remove the horrible little envelope and crisp clinging oiled paper from the new blade. Then there was the problem, oft-pondered, never solved, of what to do with the old blade, which might imperil the fingers of his young. As usual, he tossed it on top of the medicine-cabinet, with a mental note that some day he must remove the fifty or sixty other blades that were also temporarily, piled up there. He finished his shaving in a growing testiness increased by his spinning headache and by the emptiness in his stomach. When he was done, his round face smooth and streamy and his eyes stinging from soapy water, he reached for a towel. The family towels were wet, wet and clammy and vile, all of them wet, he found, as he blindly snatched them — his own face-towel, his wife's, Verona's, Ted's, Tinka's, and the lone bath-towel with the huge welt of initial. Then George F. Babbitt did a dismaying thing. He wiped his face on the guest-towel! It was a pansy-embroidered trifle which always hung there to indicate that the Babbitts were in the best Floral Heights society. No one had ever used it. No guest had ever dared to. Guests secretively took a corner of the nearest regular towel.
He was raging, “By golly, here they go and use up all the towels, every doggone one of 'em, and they use 'em and get 'em all wet and sopping, and never put out a dry one for me — of course, I'm the goat! — and then I want one and — I'm the only person in the doggone house that's got the slightest doggone bit of consideration for other people and thoughtfulness and consider there may be others that may want to use the doggone bathroom after me and consider — ”
He was pitching the chill abominations into the bath-tub, pleased by the vindictiveness of that desolate flapping sound; and in the midst his wife serenely trotted in, observed serenely, “Why Georgie dear, what are you doing? Are you going to wash out the towels? Why, you needn't wash out the towels. Oh, Georgie, you didn't go and use the guest-towel, did you?”
It is not recorded that he was able to answer.
For the first time in weeks he was sufficiently roused by his wife to look at her.
IV
Myra Babbitt — Mrs. George F. Babbitt — was definitely mature. She had creases from the corners of her mouth to the bottom of her chin, and her plump neck bagged. But the thing that marked her as having passed the line was that she no longer had reticences before her husband, and no longer worried about not having reticences. She was in a petticoat now, and corsets which bulged, and unaware of being seen in bulgy corsets. She had become so dully habituated to married life that in her full matronliness she was as sexless as an anemic nun. She was a good woman, a kind woman, a diligent woman, but no one, save perhaps Tinka her ten-year-old, was at all interested in her or entirely aware that she was alive.
After a rather thorough discussion of all the domestic and social aspects of towels she apologized to Babbitt for his having an alcoholic headache; and he recovered enough to endure the search for a B.V.D.[2] undershirt which had, he pointed out, malevolently been concealed among his clean pajamas.
He was fairly amiable in the conference on the brown suit.
“What do you think, Myra?” He pawed at the clothes hunched on a chair in their bedroom, while she moved about mysteriously adjusting and patting her petticoat and, to his jaundiced eye, never seeming to get on with her dressing. “How about it? Shall I wear the brown suit another day?”
“Well, it looks awfully nice on you.”
“I know, but gosh, it needs pressing.”
“That's so. Perhaps it does.”
“It certainly could stand being pressed, all right.”
“Yes, perhaps it wouldn't hurt it to be pressed.”
“But gee, the coat doesn't need pressing. No sense in having the whole darn suit pressed, when the coat doesn't need it.”
“That's so.”
“But the pants certainly need it, all right. Look at them — look at those wrinkles — the pants certainly do need pressing.”
“That's so. Oh, Georgie, why couldn't you wear the brown coat with the blue trousers we were wondering what we'd do with them?”
“Good Lord! Did you ever in all my life know me to wear the coat of one suit and the pants of another? What do you think I am? A busted bookkeeper?”
“Well, why don't you put on the dark gray suit to-day, and stop in at the tailor and leave the brown trousers?”
“Well, they certainly need — Now where the devil is that gray suit? Oh, yes, here we are.”
He was able to get through the other crises of dressing with comparative resoluteness and calm.
His first adornment was the sleeveless dimity B.V.D. undershirt, in which he resembled a small boy humorlessly wearing a cheesecloth tabard at a civic pageant. He never put on B.V.D.'s without thanking the God of Progress that he didn't wear tight, long, old-fashioned undergarments, like his father-in-law and partner, Henry Thompson. His second embellishment was combing and slicking back his hair. It gave him a tremendous forehead, arching up two inches beyond the former hair-line. But most wonder-working of all was the donning of his spectacles.
There is character in spectacles — the pretentious tortoiseshell, the meek pince-nez of the school teacher, the twisted silver-framed glasses of the old villager. Babbitt's spectacles had huge, circular, frameless lenses of the very best glass; the ear-pieces were thin bars of gold. In them he was the modern business man; one who gave orders to clerks and drove a car and played occasional golf and was scholarly in regard to Salesmanship. His head suddenly appeared not babyish but weighty, and you noted his heavy, blunt nose, his straight mouth and thick, long upper lip, his chin overfleshy but strong; with respect you beheld him put on the rest of his uniform as a Solid Citizen.
The gray suit was well cut, well made, and completely undistinguished. It was a standard suit. White piping on the V of the vest added a flavor of law and learning. His shoes were black laced boots, good boots, honest boots, standard boots, extraordinarily uninteresting boots. The only frivolity was in his purple knitted scarf. With considerable comment on the matter to Mrs. Babbitt (who, acrobatically fastening the back of her blouse to her skirt with a safety-pin, did not hear a word he said), he chose between the purple scarf and a tapestry effect with stringless brown harps among blown palms, and into it he thrust a snake-head pin with opal eyes.
A sensational event was changing from the brown suit to the gray the contents of his pockets. He was earnest about these objects. They were of eternal importance, like baseball or the Republican Party. They included a fountain pen and a silver pencil (always lacking a supply of new leads) which belonged in the righthand upper vest pocket. Without them he would have felt naked. On his watch-chain were a gold penknife, silver cigar-cutter, seven keys (the use of two of which he had forgotten), and incidentally a good watch. Depending from the chain was a large, yellowish elk's-tooth-proclamation of his membership in the Brotherly and Protective Order of Elks. Most significant of all was his loose-leaf pocket note-book, that modern and efficient note-book which contained the addresses of people whom he had forgotten, prudent memoranda of postal money-orders which had reached their destinations months ago, stamps which had lost their mucilage, clippings of verses by T. Cholmondeley Frink and of the newspaper editorials from which Babbitt got his opinions and his polysyllables, notes to be sure and do things which he did not intend to do, and one curious inscription — D.S.S. D.M.Y.P.D.F.
But he had no cigarette-case. No one had ever happened to give him one, so he hadn't the habit, and people who carried cigarette-cases he regarded as effeminate.
Last, he stuck in his lapel the Boosters' Club button. With the conciseness of great art the button displayed two words: “Boosters-Pep!” It made Babbitt feel loyal and important. It associated him with Good Fellows, with men who were nice and human, and important in business circles. It was his V.C., his Legion of Honor ribbon, his Phi Beta Kappa key.
With the subtleties of dressing ran other complex worries. “I feel kind of punk this morning,” he said. “I think I had too much dinner last evening. You oughtn't to serve those heavy banana fritters.”
“But you asked me to have some.”
“I know, but — I tell you, when a fellow gets past forty he has to look after his digestion. There's a lot of fellows that don't take proper care of themselves. I tell you at forty a man's a fool or his doctor — I mean, his own doctor. Folks don't give enough attention to this matter of dieting. Now I think — Course a man ought to have a good meal after the day's work, but it would be a good thing for both of us if we took lighter lunches.”
“But Georgie, here at home I always do have a light lunch.”
“Mean to imply I make a hog of myself, eating down-town? Yes, sure! You'd have a swell time if you had to eat the truck that new steward hands out to us at the Athletic Club! But I certainly do feel out of sorts, this morning. Funny, got a pain down here on the left side — but no, that wouldn't be appendicitis, would it? Last night, when I was driving over to Verg Gunch's, I felt a pain in my stomach, too. Right here it was — kind of a sharp shooting pain. I — Where'd that dime go to? Why don't you serve more prunes at breakfast? Of course I eat an apple every evening — an apple a day keeps the doctor away — but still, you ought to have more prunes, and not all these fancy doodads.”
“The last time I had prunes you didn't eat them.”
“Well, I didn't feel like eating 'em, I suppose. Matter of fact, I think I did eat some of 'em. Anyway — I tell you it's mighty important to — I was saying to Verg Gunch, just last evening, most people don't take sufficient care of their diges — ”
“Shall we have the Gunches for our dinner, next week?”
“Why sure; you bet.”
“Now see here, George: I want you to put on your nice dinner-jacket that evening.”
“Rats! The rest of 'em won't want to dress.”
“Of course they will. You remember when you didn't dress for the Littlefields' supper-party, and all the rest did, and how embarrassed you were.”
“Embarrassed, hell! I wasn't embarrassed. Everybody knows I can put on as expensive a Tux. as anybody else, and I should worry if I don't happen to have it on sometimes. All a darn nuisance, anyway. All right for a woman, that stays around the house all the time, but when a fellow's worked like the dickens all day, he doesn't want to go and hustle his head off getting into the soup-and-fish for a lot of folks that he's seen in just reg'lar ordinary clothes that same day.”
“You know you enjoy being seen in one. The other evening you admitted you were glad I'd insisted on your dressing. You said you felt a lot better for it. And oh, Georgie, I do wish you wouldn't say 'Tux.' It's 'dinner-jacket.'”
“Rats, what's the odds?”
“Well, it's what all the nice folks say. Suppose Lucile McKelvey heard you calling it a 'Tux.'”
“Well, that's all right now! Lucile McKelvey can't pull anything on me! Her folks are common as mud, even if her husband and her dad are millionaires! I suppose you're trying to rub in your exalted social position! Well, let me tell you that your revered paternal ancestor, Henry T., doesn't even call it a 'Tux.'! He calls it a 'bobtail jacket for a ringtail monkey,' and you couldn't get him into one unless you chloroformed him!”
“Now don't be horrid, George.”
“Well, I don't want to be horrid, but Lord! you're getting as fussy as Verona. Ever since she got out of college she's been too rambunctious to live with — doesn't know what she wants — well, I know what she wants! — all she wants is to marry a millionaire, and live in Europe, and hold some preacher's hand, and simultaneously at the same time stay right here in Zenith and be some blooming kind of a socialist agitator or boss charity-worker or some damn thing! Lord, and Ted is just as bad! He wants to go to college, and he doesn't want to go to college. Only one of the three that knows her own mind is Tinka. Simply can't understand how I ever came to have a pair of shillyshallying children like Rone and Ted. I may not be any Rockefeller or James J. Shakespeare, but I certainly do know my own mind, and I do keep right on plugging along in the office and — Do you know the latest? Far as I can figure out, Ted's new bee is he'd like to be a movie actor and — And here I've told him a hundred times, if he'll go to college and law-school and make good, I'll set him up in business and — Verona just exactly as bad. Doesn't know what she wants. Well, well, come on! Aren't you ready yet? The girl rang the bell three minutes ago.”
V
Before he followed his wife, Babbitt stood at the westernmost window of their room. This residential settlement, Floral Heights, was on a rise; and though the center of the city was three miles away — Zenith had between three and four hundred thousand inhabitants now — he could see the top of the Second National Tower, an Indiana limestone building of thirty-five stories.
Its shining walls rose against April sky to a simple cornice like a streak of white fire. Integrity was in the tower, and decision. It bore its strength lightly as a tall soldier. As Babbitt stared, the nervousness was soothed from his face, his slack chin lifted in reverence. All he articulated was “That's one lovely sight!” but he was inspired by the rhythm of the city; his love of it renewed. He beheld the tower as a temple-spire of the religion of business, a faith passionate, exalted, surpassing common men; and as he clumped down to breakfast he whistled the ballad “Oh, by gee, by gosh, by jingo” as though it were a hymn melancholy and noble.
CHAPTER II
I
Relieved of Babbitt's bumbling and the soft grunts with which his wife expressed the sympathy she was too experienced to feel and much too experienced not to show, their bedroom settled instantly into impersonality.
It gave on the sleeping-porch. It served both of them as dressing-room, and on the coldest nights Babbitt luxuriously gave up the duty of being manly and retreated to the bed inside, to curl his toes in the warmth and laugh at the January gale.
The room displayed a modest and pleasant color-scheme, after one of the best standard designs of the decorator who “did the interiors” for most of the speculative-builders' houses in Zenith. The walls were gray, the woodwork white, the rug a serene blue; and very much like mahogany was the furniture — the bureau with its great clear mirror, Mrs. Babbitt's dressing-table with toilet-articles of almost solid silver, the plain twin beds, between them a small table holding a standard electric bedside lamp, a glass for water, and a standard bedside book with colored illustrations — what particular book it was cannot be ascertained, since no one had ever opened it. The mattresses were firm but not hard, triumphant modern mattresses which had cost a great deal of money; the hot-water radiator was of exactly the proper scientific surface for the cubic contents of the room. The windows were large and easily opened, with the best catches and cords, and Holland roller-shades guaranteed not to crack. It was a masterpiece among bedrooms, right out of Cheerful Modern Houses for Medium Incomes. Only it had nothing to do with the Babbitts, nor with any one else. If people had ever lived and loved here, read thrillers at midnight and lain in beautiful indolence on a Sunday morning, there were no signs of it. It had the air of being a very good room in a very good hotel. One expected the chambermaid to come in and make it ready for people who would stay but one night, go without looking back, and never think of it again.
Every second house in Floral Heights had a bedroom precisely like this.
The Babbitts' house was five years old. It was all as competent and glossy as this bedroom. It had the best of taste, the best of inexpensive rugs, a simple and laudable architecture, and the latest conveniences. Throughout, electricity took the place of candles and slatternly hearth-fires. Along the bedroom baseboard were three plugs for electric lamps, concealed by little brass doors. In the halls were plugs for the vacuum cleaner, and in the living-room plugs for the piano lamp, for the electric fan. The trim dining-room (with its admirable oak buffet, its leaded-glass cupboard, its creamy plaster walls, its modest scene of a salmon expiring upon a pile of oysters) had plugs which supplied the electric percolator and the electric toaster.
In fact there was but one thing wrong with the Babbitt house: It was not a home.
II
Often of a morning Babbitt came bouncing and jesting in to breakfast. But things were mysteriously awry to-day. As he pontifically tread the upper hall he looked into Verona's bedroom and protested, “What's the use of giving the family a high-class house when they don't appreciate it and tend to business and get down to brass tacks?”
He marched upon them: Verona, a dumpy brown-haired girl of twenty-two, just out of Bryn Mawr[3], given to solicitudes about duty and sex and God and the unconquerable bagginess of the gray sports-suit she was now wearing. Ted — Theodore Roosevelt Babbitt — a decorative boy of seventeen. Tinka — Katherine — still a baby at ten, with radiant red hair and a thin skin which hinted of too much candy and too many ice cream sodas. Babbitt did not show his vague irritation as he tramped in. He really disliked being a family tyrant, and his nagging was as meaningless as it was frequent. He shouted at Tinka, “Well, kittiedoolie!” It was the only pet name in his vocabulary, except the “dear” and “hon.” with which he recognized his wife, and he flung it at Tinka every morning.
He gulped a cup of coffee in the hope of pacifying his stomach and his soul. His stomach ceased to feel as though it did not belong to him, but Verona began to be conscientious and annoying, and abruptly there returned to Babbitt the doubts regarding life and families and business which had clawed at him when his dream-life and the slim fairy girl had fled.
Verona had for six months been filing-clerk at the Gruensberg Leather Company offices, with a prospect of becoming secretary to Mr. Gruensberg and thus, as Babbitt defined it, “getting some good out of your expensive college education till you're ready to marry and settle down.”
But now said Verona: “Father! I was talking to a classmate of mine that's working for the Associated Charities — oh, Dad, there's the sweetest little babies that come to the milk-station there! — and I feel as though I ought to be doing something worth while like that.”
“What do you mean 'worth while'? If you get to be Gruensberg's secretary — and maybe you would, if you kept up your shorthand and didn't go sneaking off to concerts and talkfests every evening — I guess you'll find thirty-five or forty bones a week worth while!”
“I know, but — oh, I want to — contribute — I wish I were working in a settlement-house[4]. I wonder if I could get one of the department-stores to let me put in a welfare-department with a nice rest-room and chintzes and wicker chairs and so on and so forth. Or I could — ”
“Now you look here! The first thing you got to understand is that all this uplift and flipflop and settlement-work and recreation is nothing in God's world but the entering wedge for socialism. The sooner a man learns he isn't going to be coddled, and he needn't expect a lot of free grub and, uh, all these free classes and flipflop and doodads for his kids unless he earns 'em, why, the sooner he'll get on the job and produce — produce — produce! That's what the country needs, and not all this fancy stuff that just enfeebles the will-power of the working man and gives his kids a lot of notions above their class. And you — if you'd tend to business instead of fooling and fussing — All the time! When I was a young man I made up my mind what I wanted to do, and stuck to it through thick and thin, and that's why I'm where I am to-day, and — Myra! What do you let the girl chop the toast up into these dinky little chunks for? Can't get your fist onto 'em. Half cold, anyway!”
Ted Babbitt, junior in the great East Side High School, had been making hiccup-like sounds of interruption. He blurted now, “Say, Rone, you going to — ”
Verona whirled. “Ted! Will you kindly not interrupt us when we're talking about serious matters!”
“Aw punk,” said Ted judicially. “Ever since somebody slipped up and let you out of college, Ammonia, you been pulling these nut conversations about what-nots and so-on-and-so-forths. Are you going to — I want to use the car tonight.”
Babbitt snorted, “Oh, you do! May want it myself!” Verona protested, “Oh, you do, Mr. Smarty! I'm going to take it myself!” Tinka wailed, “Oh, papa, you said maybe you'd drive us down to Rosedale!” and Mrs. Babbitt, “Careful, Tinka, your sleeve is in the butter.” They glared, and Verona hurled, “Ted, you're a perfect pig about the car!”
“Course you're not! Not a-tall!” Ted could be maddeningly bland. “You just want to grab it off, right after dinner, and leave it in front of some skirt's house all evening while you sit and gas about lite'ature and the highbrows you're going to marry — if they only propose!”
“Well, Dad oughtn't to EVER let you have it! You and those beastly Jones boys drive like maniacs. The idea of your taking the turn on Chautauqua Place at forty miles an hour!”
