Babbitt (Summarized Edition)

Published in 1922, Babbitt is Sinclair Lewis's incisive anatomy of American middle-class life, following George F. Babbitt, a prosperous real-estate broker in the bustling, fictional city of Zenith. With merciless irony and sympathetic nuance, Lewis catalogs Rotary luncheons, sales patter, gadgets, and civic boosterism, tracing how consumer spectacle and clubby conformity shape desires and speech....