Shelf life: Looking at secular books

Sarah Allen  |  Features  |  Secular Shelf Life
Date posted:  1 Jul 2008
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BABBITT
By Sinclair Lewis
BiblioBazaar. 344 pages. (Dover Thrift edition, £3.50 via Amazon — it can also be read free online)
ISBN 978-1-426406072

This is not a new book, but, until a friend enthused about it, I had never heard of it or its author. Perhaps that’s to my shame; Sinclair Lewis published Babbitt in 1922, and a few years after was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for literature.

Then again this is an American book, a satire on the complacency and hypocrisy of American middle class life after the First World War and, as such, its reputation maybe has stayed the other side of the Atlantic.

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