When was babbitt written

It is one of Babbitt's daily rituals, similar to his lovemaking — except that his lovemaking is a ritual rarely and only disinterestedly performed. Babbitt's wife is a noisy presence, a housekeeper, and a cook; Myra Babbitt is no longer the lovely or mysterious woman whom Babbitt married.

She is Babbitt's domestic anchor and also a millstone around his neck. Babbitt and Myra rarely talk about important matters. They talk on the surface about such things as material possessions and costly knickknacks; this is the substance of their common ground.

Lewis makes little attempt to plot Babbitt's actions for us. Other than Babbitt's recurring discontent, there is little conflict in the novel. There is usually only Lewis' voice, leading us like a satiric tour guide through Babbitt's follies. Repeatedly, we see Babbitt's vast pride in American business and American big bucks and his belief that moneymaking automatically equates with Progress.

Simultaneously, like subtitles, Lewis' comments mimic loud, smug, conservative Midwesterners and their "my-country-right-or-wrong" attitudes. George F. Babbitt, a year-old real estate broker, enjoys all the modern conveniences available to a prosperous middle-class businessman, yet he is dissatisfied with his life. When the novel opens, Babbitt has begun to regularly indulge in fantasies about a fairy girl who makes him feel like a gallant youth.

Babbitt's family consists of his three children, Verona, Ted, and Tinka, and his dowdy, devoted wife, Myra. Babbitt's closest friend Paul Riesling is even more dissatisfied with his life. He is also more vocal about it. Although he dreamed of becoming a professional violinist in his youth, Riesling became mired in the life of the average middle-class businessman of his generation. His wife, Zilla, is equally unsatisfied with the monotonous, conventional routine of Zenith, but she vents her frustrations by constantly nagging Paul.

Riesling has often spoken of divorcing his wife, but, like Babbitt's frequent declarations that he is going to quit smoking, he never follows through.

Riesling and Babbitt try to ameliorate their dissatisfaction by taking a vacation in Maine together, but their enjoyment at their newfound freedom is short-lived. They eventually have to return to their lives as middle-aged married men. Both men experience a growing impulse to rebel against social conventions. When Babbitt discovers that Riesling is having an affair, he preaches the value of maintaining one's good social standing in the community. Riesling retorts that his life is miserable, so he doesn't feel guilty for seeking a little comfort in the arms of another woman.

Soon thereafter, Riesling and Zilla have another argument; Riesling snaps, shoots his wife, and subsequently receives a sentence of three years in the state penitentiary. Babbitt is devastated by the loss of Riesling's steadying presence in his life. None of this really has anything to do with Babbitt , except thematically… it just seemed like something people should mention…]. So, racial and gender issues have improved. The extent to which people were entirely and ruthlessly controlled by fashion and by public opinion.

Part of that I suspect is the lingering effect of our encounter with fascism. But not entirely for positive reasons. For one thing, civil society now is less powerful because civil society now has collapsed. These organisations, the clubs and leagues and secret orders, that gave support and comfort and a sense of place and belonging to the lost little Babbitts of the world, have largely ceased to be, or at least have lost their size and power.

That they can no longer wield the club of public opinion so surgically is good; but we are also now without their potential benefits. Particularly striking is the rise of income inequality. Babbitt is a man in an exalted position: owner of his own real estate company, a seriously important local businessman.

And yet he is constantly aware of his own smallness. He looks up to more connected comrades like Vergil Gunch, or to more educated comrades like the professor Howard Littlefield and the commercial poet Cholmondeley Frink, but more than that he is aware of the profound distance between him and the real success stories, men like the industrialist Charles McKelvey, who owns a string of national enterprises. At one point Babbitt notes that Charles is always friendly to him when they happen to meet, yet never seems to invite him to dinner.

At another, we discover that George and Charles went to university together. The thing is, the depressing thing is, today men like Babbitt would not have gone to university with men like McKelvey. McKelvey would have gone to private school, and then to Harvard or Princeton or Yale or the like, not the local state university with Babbitt. He would not bump into Babbitt at lunch, or at the golf club, or at the chamber of commerce, or at the barber, or the church, or at a meeting of the local Republican party, or anywhere else: he would eat his lunch, play his golf and have his hair cut somewhere altogether exclusive, or at his own home, and he would not go to the chamber of commerce because that part of civil society is almost dead, and he would not have anything to do with the local Republican party but would only send dollars and demands to the national committee or to a superPAC, and he would not go to church, though he might have personal spiritual advisor.

His wife would not have to blank men like Babbitt on the train because his wife would not travel by public train, but by private helicopter. Now, these worlds barely have the slightest material contact. The McKelveys and the Dodsworths and the Eathornes now live on an entirely unrelated planet to the Babbitts. Their place in the world has been adsumed by the McKelveys. Some, mostly in tech companies. Babbitt himself is hard to find these days, the Prominent Local Businessman.

Most of them have lost their jobs to the growth of the great national and international chain stores, that were no doubt once founded by the McKelveys, but are now run for them by distant Graffs. Babbitt, if he survives at all, is probably a put-upon middle-manager now, come a long way down in the world. The everyday American of Babbitt is relentlessly positive, bursting with pep, committed to boosting, filled with hope and zing.

Gee whiz. The chief difference in tone is that in the 50s, it was an imitation, and a settling — in the 20s, it was real and it was striving].

Endearingly, painfully, sincere. And Lewis may mock it, but he carries it too. Why satirise American society this way, we might think, when there is no alternative? Nothing can ever change, so why bother to complain? Lewis, to his credit, despite putting his faith in that generation, allows us to be under no illusions about their virtues, or their general annoyingness…. He not only mentioned him in his Nobel acceptance speech as a future winner, but went ahead and nominated him.

In return, Hemmingway, the true American he-man, mocked Lewis mercilessly for years, in conversation, in journalism and even in his novels, mostly for his physical appearance, which Hemingway found insufficiently he-masculine. The Lewis-stand-in character, Hemingway says, is Goebbels, if Goebbels had ever been trapped in a burning plane.

He peers about constantly, as though truth could be discovered through query. His skin is pockmarked, and his soul and heart are pitted in the same way. He looks like a disappointed weasel. He looks like he has been run half-way through a meat grinder and then been boiled, lightly, in oil. Spit runs down his face from the corner of his mouth when he speaks.

He drinks too much. He is a waste of time not worth talking about. His face looks like the hills around Verdun after the war. In Italy, nobody bothers to pay attention to him — he arouses neither love nor hate nor fear nor suspicion. The difference in how they speak of their rivals rather encapsulates the difference in approach from the two men; and indeed it can hardly be a surprise, given this, that Babbitt and his fellow he-men soon fell in love with Hemingway, and forgot about old, querying, liberal, effeminate Lewis.

And some of that depression is intentional. Lewis may not realise quite how pitiable his dreams are, but he does realise how pitiable the dreams of the Babbitts of the world are.

Babbitt is not a maudlin book — too full of boosting, and he-pep, and zing!!! There is a soul of melancholy and of desperation under the shell of fixed smiles: from the quite moments, driving through the streets at night, to the dreams of a fairy child, to the moments of doubt and dread and existential anger. There is a sense that everybody in the book is perhaps only a few feet from self-destruction — that society itself is walking on ice over a cold abyss.

There is at the best moments a suggestion of duality, of ambiguity: are the characters tied up with ropes, constrained, imprisoned… or are they roped to one another, to pitons, are the ropes all that are holding them up?

That, however, was not its selling point. Even the Babbitts owned up to being Babbitts. There are many conflicting viewpoints, all are flawed, and none are precisely promoted: the pervading sense, indeed, is one of confusion, of being at a loss as to how to proceed.

Lewis, you see, has all the subtlety of a concrete block to the head. It begins in the prose. He also gets in the odd well-formed, memorable line. It grates. Lewis is paranoid that you might not get the joke. So he makes you get it.