In the Midwestern city of Zenith the middle-aged estate agent George F. Babbitt appears to
have achieved the American dream to its fullest: he is successful at work comfortably off
exceedingly well fed has a wife and children a motor car and a neat house with a neat yard
and is a proud member of all the right clubs - in short he lacks nothing to be happy. Or does
he? As we follow his humdrum daily routine and startling events begin to unfold around him we
discover that all is not well in Babbitt's world: his moral foundations are shaking and he
can't help harbouring rebellious dreams of escape and romance. A trenchant satire on
consumeristic society and an indictment of the fatuous ideals of middle America in the Roaring
Twenties Babbitt - the crowning achievement of Sinclair Lewis winner of the 1930 Nobel Prize
in Literature - questions the attractions of materialistic fulfilment at the same time laying
bare the hollowness of social respectability and blind conformism.
