Library

This book is a collection of essays by American writer Sinclair Lewis. Sinclair Lewis was the first American winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. He created a truly American style. The first half of the twentieth century was the so-called "golden age" of the United States. Like adolescence, people are hopeful and restless at the same time. Sinclair Lewis used his steady pen to provide rich descriptions of all strata of this healthy and progressive New World society.

The protagonist, George Follansby Babbitt, is a prosperous real estate agent in Zenith. The author takes a cross-section of Babbitt's life and depicts a genre painting of urban life in the American Midwest in the 1920s with vivid and concise writing, bright colors, and witty style, vividly portraying the representative figures of the middle-class bourgeoisie. Although Zenis is a fictional name, it has typical meaning and can be regarded as any city in the United States. In that highly commercialized capitalist society, everything, including the products of human spiritual civilization, are reduced to commodities. Doctors, lawyers, priests, poets and scholars have become wage laborers paid for by the bourgeoisie. There is no other connection between people, only naked interests and ruthless "cash transactions."