Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis

Published 1922 · 330 pages · 122,699 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Satire & Humor

How hard is Babbitt to read?

Babbitt scores 45 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 40 out of 100
1920s American business vocabulary.
Sentence structure: 42 out of 100
Lewis's characteristic satirical rhythms.
Abstraction: 45 out of 100
American conformity and dissatisfaction.
Information density: 50 out of 100
Dense with Zenith social satire.
Narrative indirection: 40 out of 100
Babbitt's limitations are visible.
Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
Zenith, business, conformity carry weight.
Ironic distance: 60 out of 100
Lewis's satire is relentless.
Resolution withholding: 45 out of 100
Babbitt returns but dissatisfaction remains.
Structural complexity: 35 out of 100
Follows Babbitt through midlife crisis.

How Babbitt is regarded

Babbitt holds a literary regard score of 79 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Prizes

Where Babbitt sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (246 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Babbitt scores 72 out of 100. A second mythos, comedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.2. About the map of stories.

Mode: Low Mimetic
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.
Symbol: Formal
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.
Mythos: Irony and Satire i (irony i)
“They’ve licked me; licked me to a finish!” he whimpered.
Genre: Novel + Anatomy
At that moment in Zenith, three hundred and forty or fifty thousand Ordinary People were asleep, a vast unpenetrated shadow.

Where the story of Babbitt takes place

  • Zenith, a Midwestern American city, April 1920-1922 (1920 to 1922), the main setting
  • Lake Sunasquam, Maine, summers of 1920 and 1921 (1920 to 1921)
  • Chicago hotels and the Regency, winter 1921

6 things that are true of Babbitt, with the passage for each

  1. Babbitt is forty-six years old, and the story opens in April 1920.

    He was forty-six years old now, in April, 1920, and he made nothing in particular, neither butter nor shoes nor poetry

  2. In twenty-three years of marriage Myra has read the newspaper before her husband only sixty-seven times.

    In twenty-three years of married life, Mrs. Babbitt had seen the paper before her husband just sixty-seven times.

  3. Babbitt's best friend, Paul Riesling, shoots his wife Zilla.

    Paul’s in jail. He shot his wife, he shot Zilla, this noon.

  4. Paul is sentenced to three years in the State Penitentiary after a trial of under fifteen minutes.

    Next day Paul was sentenced to three years in the State Penitentiary

  5. The Boosters reveal that Babbitt's middle name is Follansbee by writing it on a blackboard.

    George Follansbee Babbitt—oh you Folly!

  6. Ted and Eunice Littlefield elope and announce their marriage to Babbitt and Myra.

    We got married last evening. Wife! Sit up and say a pretty good morning to mother-in-law.

Scenes in Babbitt that Frye would name

54 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Anagnorisis, untitled
practically, I’ve never done a single thing I’ve wanted to in my whole life! Babbitt's final self-recognition, spoken to Ted.
Epos, untitled
Our Ideal Citizen— I picture him first and foremost as being busier than a bird-dog, not wasting a lot of good time in day-dreaming Babbitt's annual address to the Real Estate Board is a full oration in the epos mode.
Anagnorisis, untitled
Thus it came to him merely to run away was folly, because he could never run away from himself. In the Maine wilderness Babbitt recognizes that Zenith and its illusions live inside him.
Agon, untitled
I’m damned if I’m going to be bullied into joining anything, not even by you plutes! The central contest: Babbitt against the Good Citizens' League vigilantes.
Anagnorisis, untitled
she was not merely A Woman, to be contrasted with other women, but his own self At Myra's sickbed he recognizes his wife as part of himself, which pivots his return.
Displacement, untitled
Yet Babbitt was again dreaming of the fairy child, a dream more romantic than scarlet pagodas by a silver sea. A romance pattern (the fairy child waiting beyond mysterious groves) shows through realistic motivation.

Books that share these scenes with Babbitt

About the author

Sinclair Lewis