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Download this text: Babbitt
Customer Review: Babbit
I'm listening to Babbitt on tape right now and frankly I'm finding it really depressing. I think I'm identifying and seeing too much of the character in myself.
Customer Review: Lews savages middle class with a stacked deck
Bitter, sharp-edged satire on the middle-American businessman and his culture, religion, politics, and entertainment. Lewis gets in some valid cuts at the hypocrisy of the Babbittian lifestyle, but it comes at the price of a deck stacked so strongly against Babbitt that the reader feels more sympathy than savagery toward him.
And in fact, by the denouement when things work out successfully (by convention, at least) for Babbitt, I get the feeling that Lewis feels sympathy for his character as well.
Too harsh to be considered five stars. Comparatively, I find Lewis treated Elmer Gantry (Signet Classics) more gently.
Customer Review: Everyone Should Own a Babbitt
Meet George F. Babbitt, age 46. Babbitt is a conformist. Babbitt is an image driven, merchandising, dyed-in-the-wool Presbyterian businessman. Babbitt is bleached white by a 1920's suburban midwest society and is in hot pursuit of the almighty dollar and happiness. He loves his midwest American wife and his 2.2 children. He loves his midwest American cars and good cigars. Babbitt loves being seen with all the right people in all the right bars. He's politically correct and morally right. Babbitt is everybody's dad, everybody's favorite uncle and everybody's pal. Yet, Babbit suffers. He's a victim of a kind of scurvy; a deficiency of vitamin adventure, freedom and fun. He becomes a renegade, a political apostate and pariah amoung his socially correct brethren. His newly found revolutionary spirit knows no limits. He even goes to the extreme of backing the wrong mayoral candidate, leaving stunned, an entire community that once saw him invited to all the best dinner parties in town.
But I speak of Babbitt as if he were a real person, not a fictional character from the mind of the brilliant, Sinclair Lewis. Lewis so elequently three-dimensionalizes and humanizes Babbitt that the reader will grow to love him or hate him, but know him and know him well. Lewis's artistic limelight shines so bright upon Babbitt that all other characters are not nearly as illuminated. Mrs. Babbitt, little Babbitts, friends and relatives are merely incidental; supporting roles to the essential Babbitt.
This book is complete with analysis and comments from well known literary critics from that time and since, including "the right reverend" H. L. Mencken. They all claim there is a deeper Babbitt afoot, a more meaningful issue to gnaw on than midlife crisis. They tend to psychoanalyze Babbitt to death. Whether you come to the same diagnosis as I or not, I think you'll agree that everyone should own a Babbitt.
Customer Review: Novel about middle class success, packed with Pep and Vision!
This endearing novel about George Babbitt, early 20th Century conventional middle-class success story, was easy and enjoyable to read; a page-turner. The bulk of the book is more a rich and extremely amusing description of the blustery, self-contented, self-deluding, benevolent Babbitt's day to day life as father, business-man, service club and church member than it is a typical novel with a clearly developing plot. When the plot finally develops, deep into the second half of the book, it is kind of a shock, and the chain of events seems contrived and outlandish. Without giving away what happens, suffice to say that Babbitt's whole system of beliefs is shaken, leaving him struggling to re-establish some kind of meaning in his life as his personal behavior veers wildly from what others expect of him. Like Lewis' prior novel, Main Street, the resolution involves the protagonist's acceptance or embracing of convention, although their experiences have allowed them to see it as a choice that is made rather than their only option.
Customer Review: A Rhetorical Reader
Babbitt, adeptly composed by Sinclair Lewis, is a masterpiece that will go down in the annuls of history as one of the great satires. Lewis satirizes the hypocrisy of the middle class in early 20th century America. Loaded with rhetorical devices, Babbitt serves as an immensely entertaining rhetorical reader. Though lulls in action are frequent, it serves only as to dynamically enhance the fact that Babbitt, the main character, lives a mundane life. However, these lulls also build suspense as Babbitt flirts fiercely and frequently with disaster. As aforementioned, Lewis crams his novel so full of rhetorical devices, that I was afraid the book would implode and collapse upon itself. While the beginning was so boring, it brought a tear to my eye and an anguished cry to my lips, the content does become increasingly enthralling as the story sloughs on. Readers will enjoy the myriad of pokes and jabs that Lewis takes upon the hypocrisy of humans through the vigorous use of satire and irony. Allusions and imagery are plentiful and readily available for the picking. Thoroughly enjoyable, this book has tremendous value as both a leisurely read, and an academic read. For those who wish to analyze this book, this novel is abound with rhetorical terms which one can evaluate.
Product Description
When Babbitt was first published in 1922, fans gleefully hailed its scathing portrait of a crass, materialistic nation; critics denounced it as an unfair skewering of the American businessman. Sparking heated literary debate, Babbitt became a controversial classic, securing Sinclair Lewis’s place as one of America’s preeminent social commentators.
Businessman George F. Babbitt loves the latest appliances, brand names, and the Republican Party. In fact, he loves being a solid citizen even more than he loves his wife. But Babbitt comes to resent the middle-class trappings he has worked so hard to acquire. Realizing that his life is devoid of meaning, he grows determined to transcend his trivial existence and search for greater purpose. Raising thought-provoking questions while yielding hilarious consequences, and just as relevant today as ever, Babbitt’s quest for meaning forces us to confront the Babbitt in ourselves—and ponder what it truly means to be an American.
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