Public reader discussion about Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis.
By ReefTurtle
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By StoryGolden1974
It Can’t Happen Here (1935) is basically about a made-up fascist takeover of the US, so it felt pretty on-the-nose for the era. I also found it way more grounded than a lot of dystopian stuff I’ve read, which I appreciated. I know it got loosely turned into that 1980s sci-fi miniseries V, too. After I finish a book, I usually check SparkNotes/Shmoop and similar sites to see if I missed anything, and I *thought* this one would have something… but nope. So now I’m kind of stuck wanting more discussion about it. Has anyone else read it?
By Curious-Reader
I’ve been digging into Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 book *Babbitt*. The main character’s name ended up turning into words like “Babbitry”/“Babbitism,” and even just “Babbitt,” basically to mean a pretty materialistic, smug guy who just goes along with whatever his little social group expects. It made me wonder: are there many other cases where a fictional character’s name gets used in everyday-ish language to carry a whole personality/identity vibe? I feel like this might not happen super often in newer lit (say, after 1800—could be totally wrong). One example I can think of is Bunbury from Wilde’s *The Importance of Being Earnest*—the whole made-up person used to dodge stuff. That one even got turned into “bunburying.” My rough test is whether it shows up as a dictionary entry like the OED (and both “Babbitt” and “Bunbury” are there, with definitions along those lines), but something like Fitzgerald’s Gatsby doesn’t really have the same dictionary treatment, even though “Gatsby-like” is a thing people would understand. On the other hand, I’d probably not count something like “narcissism,” since most people use it without thinking about Narcissus at all. So yeah—I'd love input from people who know more than I do. Any other examples you can think of, especially from more modern literature? Edit: I guess “Scrooge” too, and maybe “Holmesian” though that one feels weaker.