This story was inspired by a remark of Mark Twain's to the effect that it was a pity that the best part of life came at the beginning and the worst part at the end. By trying the experiment upon only one man in a perfectly normal world I have scarcely given his idea a fair trial. Several weeks after completing it, I discovered an almost identical plot in Samuel Butler's "Note-books."
"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"
