Recommendations
Books Like Babbitt
Best books to read after Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt is the great American satire of middle-class conformity — George F. Babbitt, the Zenith City real estate man who belongs to all the right clubs and briefly, unsuccessfully, rebels. These recommendations share its satirical portrait of American boosterism, its engagement with Lewis's own satirical project, or its place in the broader tradition of American social satire.
- 1Buy
Main Street
by Sinclair Lewis
The companion Lewis — Carol Kennicott in Gopher Prairie, the small-town conformity that precedes and contextualizes Babbitt's urban boosterism.
- 2Buy
Arrowsmith
by Sinclair Lewis
The idealist counterpart — Martin Arrowsmith navigating medical institutions, Lewis's most earnest portrait against Babbitt's pure satire.
- 3Buy
Elmer Gantry
by Sinclair Lewis
The religious satire companion — the fraudulent evangelist as the spiritual counterpart to Babbitt's secular boosterism, Lewis's most scandalous novel.
- 4Buy
The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The contemporary portrait of the same 1920s America Babbitt satirizes — Jay Gatsby's aspiration and Daisy's world, the dream that Babbitt embodies in its suburban version.
- 5Buy
Winesburg, Ohio
by Sherwood Anderson
The small-town grotesques that preceded Lewis's satire — Anderson's Winesburg and Lewis's Gopher Prairie/Zenith City are the two great portraits of Midwestern provincial life.
- 6Buy
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
by Sloan Wilson
The 1950s update to Babbitt — Tom Rath in corporate America, the conformist pressure of the organization man, the same critique a generation later in a different form.
- 7Buy
Death of a Salesman
by Arthur Miller
Willy Loman and the American Dream in its most tragic form — the playwright's version of Babbitt's delusion, the salesman who believes what Babbitt has taught him to believe.
- 8Buy
It Can't Happen Here
by Sinclair Lewis
The late Lewis political warning — a fascist demagogue taking over America, written as Hitler rose, showing Lewis's satirical intelligence applied to democracy's fragility.
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