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Babbitt takes place in Zenith, an imaginary city of 360,000 in the American Midwest. Zenith is more than just the novel\'s setting, though. Because Lewis wanted Babbitt to portray not just one man but an entire society, Zenith is in some ways as important a character as Babbitt himself and is presented in as much satiric detail. And just as Lewis wanted the character Babbitt to stand for many conformist, success-hungry Americans, he wanted Zenith to stand for all that is admirable and dreadful about a large segment of America--not the biggest cities or the small towns but the places in between where so many of us live. And although on the surface Babbitt may seem to be a realistic novel, at its heart it really isn\'t that; instead it\'s a comic attack. As you read the book you\'ll want to ask yourself in what ways Babbitt is an accurate portrait of America in the 1920s. What do you think has been exaggerated and what left out of Lewis\'s portrait? In what ways is the portrait still accurate today?
Our first view of Zenith is a stirring one. It seems a city made for giants, fully worthy of its name, which means \"highest point.\" It\'s one of the engines pulling America into the industrialized twentieth century. The products it manufactures are sold around the world. Its laboratories make it a center of science and engineering. Its prosperity has insured a comfortable life for its middle class.
Yet we see Zenith\'s failures in even more glaring detail. Zenith lives for business profits; everything else is unimportant. It calls itself religious, but the religion of Mike Monday and John Jennison Drew mainly keeps the working class under the thumb of the rich. Its literature is the hack poetry of T. Cholmondeley Frink. Its municipal government is manipulated by crooked politicians like Jake Offutt and by crooked businessmen like Henry P. Thompson. It calls itself a land of equality, but the lines between social classes--between the rich McKelveys and the middle-class Babbitts, for example--are impossible to cross. It calls itself a democracy, but its most respectable citizens refuse to tolerate views different from their own.
This standardization is probably the worst of Zenith\'s flaws. On a minor level, it means that downtown Zenith resembles every other downtown in America, and that Babbitt\'s living room resembles every other living room in Floral Heights. But more importantly, it means that Babbitt\'s opinions are the opinions of every other member of the Boosters\' Club--and that any one who dares to think differently is considered a threat.
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