[Pocket Edition] World Classics Library - Street

Author: Sinclair Lewis (USA)
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-11-01
Features: This book is part of the "World Classics Library," a fully translated and illustrated edition. Babbitt is the masterpiece of Sinclair Lewis, an American Nobel Prize-winning author. After its publication, it quickly became a sensation in Europe and America, being reprinted 28 times within a year and hailed as the "most talked-about event in 20th-century American publishing." The book also became a required reading for students in all grades in Kansas at the time. The novel features a fresh theme, a distinctive style, and a rich sense of the American Midwest, with critics calling it the "most outstanding work in American literature depicting local color." Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) was a renowned American novelist and a Nobel Prize laureate. Babbitt was his breakthrough work. Carol is a beautiful, lively, and romantically inclined young woman from an eastern U.S. city. After graduating from college, she marries a practical and conservative country doctor, Kennicott, and moves to Gopher Town, a wealthy but dull Midwestern community. Unwilling to waste her youth in idleness, she aspires to reform the town. Unbeknownst to her, her most basic requests are rejected by the conservative forces in Gopher Town, who represent the ignorant and mercenary resistance to any change, resorting to covert surveillance, slander, and other means to threaten her. Surrounded by the conservative forces, she feels lonely, confused, frustrated, and desperate, even breaking up with her husband and going to Washington to seek a new path. There, she realizes the root of the problem: "The real enemy is not just a few individuals, but the conventions themselves." Two years later, she returns to her husband's side, placing her hope in the great future—the year 2000.