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It\'s April 1920. Above the morning mist rise the towers of Zenith, a city of 360,000 somewhere in the American midwest. In a suburban house, a forty-six-year-old realtor named George Babbitt wakes, shaves, eats breakfast. Every object he owns is a symbol of his prosperous, respectable life. Yet Babbitt is filled with a discontent, which he takes out on his patient but dull wife, Myra, and on his children, Verona, Ted, and Tinka.
As we follow Babbitt through his day, we see his many--often very funny--failings. Loud, smug, backslapping, he boasts of business ethics but doesn\'t really know what they are. Yet he\'s capable of sensitivity, as when he explains his unhappiness to his best friend Paul Riesling. Paul, a once-promising violinist who now sells roofing, says that Zenith\'s cutthroat competitive ways make people unhappy. He suggests a week in Maine away from businesses and families.
Babbitt\'s day ends. As Babbitt goes to sleep, Lewis shows us other scenes of Zenith life: the city\'s idle rich and its struggling poor, its would-be reformers and its cynical politicians. Zenith is modern and prosperous, but it\'s full of conformist citizens like Babbitt and his friends, who all buy the same products and think the same thoughts.
Social success is as important as business success in Zenith, and when the Babbitts hold a dinner party they invite their most \"highbrow\" friends, including Boosters\' Club president Vergil Gunch and famous poet T. Cholmondeley Frink. But Frink\'s dreadful verse and the deadly dull dinner conversation prove how little genuine art or wit there is in Zenith. Babbitt persuades his wife to let him go to Maine. The Babbitts then visit the even more unhappily married Rieslings, where Babbitt bullies clever, bitter Zilla Riesling into letting Paul go with him.
The Maine woods make Babbitt and Paul feel young again, and Babbitt vows he\'ll change his life. But as soon as he\'s back in Zenith, he\'s avidly chasing business success and making crooked deals he refuses to admit are dishonest. He aids conservative Lucas Prout\'s campaign for mayor against the \"radical\" lawyer Seneca Doane and addresses the Zenith Chamber of Commerce, where in a speech that is unintentionally hilarious but at the same time disturbing, he claims Zenith is the finest city in the world because it contains so many Standardized American Citizens who think and act alike.
Anxious to improve their social standing, the Babbitts invite the wealthy Charles McKelveys to dinner, but the McKelveys aren\'t interested in acquiring middle-class friends. The Babbitts, for their part, behave equally snobbishly to the lower-class Overbrooks. Zenith, we see, claims to be a place of equality, but its social barriers are impossible to cross. Zenith also claims to be religious, but its religion is more a high-powered business than a faith.
Babbitt seems to go from success to success. But he still worries about business and about his family. While on a business trip to Chicago, he sees Paul Riesling dining with a strange woman. He tries to get Paul to end the affair, but a few weeks later, as Babbitt is glorying in his election as Boosters\' Club vice president, he gets word that Paul has shot his wife, Zilla. She survives, but Paul is put into prison, and Babbitt has lost his only friend.
Adrift, Babbitt thinks of having an affair himself. He\'s attracted to an elegant client, Mrs. Tanis Judique, but instead turns his attentions to a teenaged manicurist--unsuccessfully. He goes to Maine, hoping to find the happiness he found there the year before, but this time sees only the same greed and conformity he sees in Zenith. On the train home, Babbitt bumps into Seneca Doane. This much-hated man surprises Babbitt by seeming intelligent, rational, and humane. Babbitt begins to express sympathy with Doane\'s liberal views, though without really understanding them.
His new beliefs are soon tested when Zenith is hit with labor strife. While Babbitt\'s conservative friends demand the strike be halted, Babbitt sides with the workers. Now Babbitt begins to see firsthand the price of any kind of nonconformity in Zenith: his friends grow deeply suspicious of him.
The strike is crushed. Babbitt, still looking for something or someone to give meaning to his life, begins to visit Tanis Judique. Tanis is part of a wild set who call themselves \"The Bunch,\" and when Babbitt is seen with them, his old friends grow more hostile. Then Babbitt commits another \"crime\": he refuses Vergil Gunch\'s invitation to join the Good Citizens\' League, a group dedicated to stifling opinions it considers too liberal.
Mrs. Babbitt, confused and unhappy about her husband, seeks comfort in the half-baked philosophy of the American New Thought League. Babbitt feels trapped; even after he ends his affair with Tanis, pressure from Gunch and his other conservative friends increases. Join the Good Citizens\' League, they demand, and when he again refuses they make him an outcast in his own city, whispering, spying, denying Babbitt both friendship and business.
One night Mrs. Babbitt complains of a pain in her side: appendicitis. The illness terrifies her and Babbitt as well. As they rush to the hospital, he realizes he\'s too weak to continue his rebellion. Zenith has licked him. He vows loyalty to all the false values he briefly fought: to business, to success, to Zenith.
Mrs. Babbitt recovers. At the end of the book, Babbitt is almost the same man he was at its start--except that now he has no illusions about his dishonest, empty life. When his son Ted shocks the family by eloping, and asks permission to quit college and become a mechanic, Babbitt takes him aside and gives his approval. Perhaps the younger generation can make up for Babbitt\'s failure--if, unlike Babbitt, Ted can remain unafraid of his family, unafraid of Zenith, unafraid of himself. Then disillusioned father and still-hopeful son march in to greet their family.
Babbitt is a satiric look both at one man and at an entire society. As such, it\'s crowded with characters. Some of them, notably George Babbitt, are well developed, possessing the mixture of good and bad qualities that human beings possess. But many others are flat and simple--not flesh-and-blood people so much as representatives of the various social classes and occupations that Lewis wants to satirize.
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