George Babbitt has it all: a successful real estate job, a shiny car, a modern house equipped with all the latest technology, and a devoted wife and three children. However, underneath his public persona, he's beginning to feel that something is missing, and when a tragic incident occurs Babbitt revolts against his hollow life. Can he overthrow everything he values, or will he remain trapped in the machinery of modern life? Set and published in the prohibition era of the 1920s, Babbitt remains as fresh and relevant today as when it was first published. Its take on American consumerist culture, middle-class life and conformism was instrumental in the decision to award Sinclair Lewis the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930.
"It's common in twentieth-century American fiction to decry the emptiness of middle-class life, and BABBITT has become the eponym of that theme. Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis is well served by narrator Adam Sims, who makes the shallow, hypocritical, money-grubbing George Babbitt more and more sympathetic as he learns--and struggles against--the limitations of his own nature. Sims deftly portrays the many moods of the protagonist and his friends and contacts in a bustling Midwestern city in the early 1920s. The pressures to conform and to be financially successful seem to be deeply ingrained in the American psyche, and this audiobook portrays the despair that often results. The rise and fall of Babbitt's rebellion come close to tragedy. D.M.H. � AudioFile 2025, Portland, Maine"
