14 h 22 minAudiobook12 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What if the house, the car, and the good name belong to a life you never chose?
George F. Babbitt sells houses and land in Zenith, a booming Midwestern city that loves to boast. He has a comfortable home, a busy social life, and a reputation to protect. Yet beneath the sales talk and club chatter, he feels a hunger for something freer. Sinclair Lewis turns this respectable businessman’s daily routine into a sharp comedy about the cost of fitting in.
At home, Myra Babbitt tends to George’s comfort while their children question the choices he expects them to make. His oldest friend, Paul Riesling, longs to escape an unhappy marriage. Around them, business values shape religion, politics, and friendship. Babbitt wants approval, but his growing restlessness puts that desire under strain: how much room does Zenith leave for a mind of one’s own?
What you’ll discover
- A city built to boast Step beneath Zenith’s towers, where civic pride and business ambition fill the conversation.
- The comedy of respectability Hear the gap between Babbitt’s confident words and the doubts his daily life reveals.
- Comfort with cracks beneath Meet a family whose comfortable home cannot keep different hopes from pulling them apart.
- The pressure to agree See how clubs, friends, and shared habits make conformity feel like personal choice.
- A hunger for freedom Follow Babbitt’s uneasy longing for something beyond property, approval, and a good name.
Who will love it
For readers who love social comedy and sharp portraits of middle-class conformity, and anyone who works in an office or sales job and sometimes wonders why.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- Zenith is a city built to boast
- A day begins with gadgets and grumbling
- Selling real estate means selling a story
- Friends, clubs, and a drink in secret
- Family strains show beneath the comfort
- Restlessness grows and a trip to Maine
- Conformity is the real power in Zenith
- Money, religion, and politics serve the same creed
- A comic style that sees every detail
Who’s who
- George F. BabbittA forty-six-year-old Zenith real estate broker who wants to be admired as a solid citizen yet feels a vague hunger for something freer.
- Myra BabbittHis patient, plain wife, who looks after the house and his comfort and is rarely asked what she thinks.
- Paul RieslingBabbitt's oldest friend, a former would-be violinist now selling roofing, who longs to escape an unhappy marriage.
- Ted BabbittThe son, who loves machines and movies, resists school and wants to make his own choices.
- Verona BabbittThe eldest daughter, a college graduate who is thoughtful and unsettled about what to do with her life.
- Henry ThompsonBabbitt's father-in-law and business partner, an older and shrewder man whom Babbitt wants to impress.
- Vergil GunchA loud, hearty businessman and club leader who stands for the Zenith spirit of cheerful conformity.
- Seneca DoaneA liberal lawyer whose independent views make him an outsider among Babbitt's circle.
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- Audiobook
- 14 h 22 min, complete, read by Lucas Linden.
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- Paperback
- 6 × 9 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Hardcover
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- Large print paperback
- 8.5 × 11 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Large print hardcover
- 8.5 × 11 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
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Babbitt
by Sinclair Lewis · 1922
In Zenith, real estate broker George F. Babbitt begins to question the comfortable life that wins him approval.
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From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1 of 9
Zenith is a city built to boast
The novel opens on the towers of Zenith, rising out of the morning mist. Lewis describes them with real admiration at first, as steel and cement and limestone that look strong and light at once. The city is a made-up one, set in the fictional state of Winnemac, and it stands for any fast-growing American place in the early 1920s. It has factories, banks, new office blocks and neat suburbs called things like Floral Heights.
The tone is a little too grand, and that is the first joke. Zenith believes it is the best of everything. Its people count its population, its buildings and its dollars the way other people count blessings. Lewis lets the city speak in its own proud voice, so that the reader hears both the pride and the emptiness behind it.
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What is Babbitt about?
Babbitt is about George F. Babbitt, a middle-aged real estate broker in the city of Zenith. He lives by the rules of business and club life, but a growing restlessness makes him question his comfortable existence.
What does the word Babbitt mean?
The word came from this novel and describes a person who follows middle-class values and fashions without question, often with pride in business success and little interest in art or ideas.
Is Zenith a real city?
No. Zenith is an invented city in the invented state of Winnemac. Lewis modeled it on growing Midwestern cities of the early 1920s, so it feels familiar to many American readers.
The author
Sinclair Lewis
1885–1951 · American novelist
Sinclair Lewis was an American novelist and the first writer from the United States to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Babbitt, his satire of small-city boosterism and middle-class conformity, added a new word to the American vocabulary.
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