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Summary: A masterpiece of American 20th century literature
Review: A must read on anyones list. This book holds many insights about the early 1920's society that still hold very true in our own chaotic time. Though the book is tiresome to read in spots, the overall effect of it is awesome.
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Summary: Tell me What The True Message Is
Review: Babbitt is a very intriguing story. A businessman has a mid-life crisis and realizes somewhere along the line his life is not all that great. He doesn't love anything; he isn't the man he wants to be; he isn't where he wants to be. Nothing goes write for George Babbitt. Somewhere along the line Babbitt gets the idea he'd found happiness but soon after realizes it's just an illusion. Babbitt is a powerful character drownded in greed, in desperation, a pathetic man. He never did anything he wanted to, as he says, but he never figured out what he wanted to do either. Babbitt is an incomplete man, but somehow Sinclair Lewis drew a complete picture of Babbitt's pathetic life. Therein lies the greatness of the novel and Lewis' powerful storytelling.
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Summary: I loved this business satire.
Review: This book was amazin
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Summary: Babbitt is Us
Review: Though written some 70 years ago, Babbitt still is the most accurate portrait I have seen of the people of the northern, middle America. I grew up in Ohio and can honestly say that the state is, for better or for worse, filled with the characters that populate this wonderful novel. As America becomes all the more suburbanized, it becomes more Babbitt-ized. This si all the more reason to read this hilarious yet maudlin book.
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Summary: An excellent read - a great Socialist work.
Review: This book is especially powerful if read immediately before or after reading Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. Where Rand promotes the virtues of Capitalism, Lewis promotes the virtures of Socialism. This is an fascinating comparative reading.
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Summary: BABBITT is an Unappreciated 20th-Century Literary Triumph
Review: Sinclair Lewis, once one of America's most popular and widely-read novelists, has, in the past 50 years, fallen into the darkness of utter anonymity. This is a true literary travesty. In my opinion, BABBITT is an evocation of the hollow American lifestyle that is unequalled in literature, including even its overrated contemporary, THE GREAT GATSBY. Lewis uses a heady mix of hard, factual journalism and broad satire to transport the reader into a world that daily seems to more resemble our own in its banality and cruelty.
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Summary: this is a very insightful book
Review: When i began reading this book i was thoroughly bored. The whole first half is one day! I thought I was going to die reading it. But then it gets better. I start to realize the stupid things that happen, and I start to notice that people I know do these superficial meaningless hypocritical things too. Sinclair Lewis captures the decieving qualities of society very well and skillfully shows it to us in this really well written book.
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Summary: The book for which Lewis won the Nobel Prize.
Review: "Babbitt," published in 1922, was the second straight publishing phenomenon for Sinclair Lewis, who had become a household name in 1920 with "Main Street." By 1930, Lewis had published three more notable novels ("Arrowsmith," "Elmer Gantry," and "Dodsworth"), declined the Pulitzer Prize in a fit of pique, and finally became the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. The 1920s were his prime years, and none of his novels was more renowned than "Babbitt," which merited special recognition from the Swedish Academy when Lewis won the Nobel Prize.So what is one to make of this novel now? It can be dreadfully dull, and could (indeed should) have been cut in half. It wanders around in search of a plot, and though many of its insights can be funny, overall one has to marvel at how genteel the literature of 1920s was in order to make this book a national sensation. Basically, it is the story of George F. Babbitt, a solidly Republican, supremely self-satisfied, deeply stupid real estate man, who has a sort of midlife crisis in the course of the novel before returning desperately to his earlier state of censorious complacency by the last chapters. Lewis designed him to be an exemplar of his class, and many thought he was. The term "Babbitt" became a popular way of referring to chubby, materialistic businessmen. And then, by the 1940s, the novel had largely faded into oblivion, except in college classes or high school reading lists. Why? Quite simply, because it's not a particularly good novel. It is a reasonably well-written slice of satirical social commentary, and little more. Today, it is merely a cultural relic from the twenties, kind of like the abominably bad "Great Gatsby," which dilettantes rave over as if it were actually a good novel. It isn't, and neither is "Babbitt." But for those interested in how America saw itself just before the Great Depression, books like these might be informative.
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Summary: Good book
Review: Only 3 stars because it is not the most exciting or enjoyable read. But, it is an important read about materialism, having the wrong dreams, and middle-class conformity. I think that "Death of a Salesman" is a more touching and interesting tale of such things, but keep in mind, that drama came out 20 years after Babbitt.
Reading Babbitt will make you re-examine your own life and will hopefully stop you from making the mistakes that poor Babbitt made.
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Summary: A classic - yet somewhat pedantic and tedious
Review: Yes, Babbitt is an undeniable classic. Yes, Sinclair Lewis provides biting satire of the middle-aged conservative middle class white male that made a profound impact on both literature and society in general; he did, needless to say, coin the term for the conformist and prosaic middle class individual with his title character, Babbitt. Laudable. Genuinely laudable.
Be that as it may, I do not need a whole book that, by the way is far from riveting, to preach to me ad nauseam of the dangers of conformity and capitulation to the powers that be. Much better books out there actually(get this!) disseminate this message in a much more subtle and much less pedantic and didactic manner(e.g. A Clockwork Orange, Fahrenheit 451, Lord of the Flies, Brave New World, 1984, & The Razor's Edge to name just a few). Painfully, Lewis incessantly introduces us to a slew of new unendearing and banal characters whose roles in the novel are less than substantive, if not just totally pointless. Lewis remains one of the best-selling American novelists of the 20th Century. That being said, he fails to belong in my opinion, however, in the 1st tier of truly sublime 20th Century literary talent such as Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Steinbeck, or even Vonnegut and Salinger.
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