What Sinclair Lewis Couldn't See

Snobbery, Superficiality, and the Blindness of Babbitt’s Creator

by John-Michael Kuczynski

There’s a reason Babbitt doesn’t fully land, even though it’s technically sharp and often funny. It’s not because Sinclair Lewis lacked talent—he didn’t. It’s not because the target (the smug, boosterish American middle-class) was undeserving of critique—it wasn’t. The problem is deeper, more structural. And it has to do with how Lewis saw—or failed to see—his subject.

Snobbery is often treated as a social vice. But it's also an epistemological one. A kind of built-in blindness. And Lewis’s portrayal of George F. Babbitt is a perfect case study in what that kind of blindness costs a writer.

Snobbery as Defended Superiority

At bottom, snobbery is defensiveness dressed up as superiority. It’s not simply disdain for the ordinary—it’s disdain aimed upward, meant to signal membership in a loftier tribe. The snob doesn’t just think Babbitt is vulgar. He needs you to know that he knows Babbitt is vulgar. And that need ruins his ability to see clearly.

Snobbery always entails a presumption of guilt: Babbitt is ridiculous because he’s a suburbanite, a Rotarian, a Republican, a real estate booster. His inner life doesn’t matter—he’s already been weighed and found wanting.

The Anthropologist Analogy

Imagine an anthropologist sent to study a remote tribe. But this anthropologist despises the people he’s meant to observe. He thinks their rituals are stupid, their beliefs primitive, their values beneath comment. Maybe, deep down, he feels threatened—by their strength, their cohesion, their joy. So he adopts a supercilious posture to reassert control.

How much will such an anthropologist learn? Nothing. His fieldwork is already over. Because whatever good is there—he won’t see it.

That’s what happens with Lewis. Babbitt isn’t examined; he’s diagnosed. And that’s where the novel thins out. We don’t get a real human being—we get a caricature, wrapped in decent prose.

And yet, paradoxically, there are moments where Babbitt breaks through—where Lewis accidentally paints him as real: confused, anxious, not especially admirable but not monstrous either. A man trying to live decently by a script he only half-understands. That accidental realism is the novel’s most compelling part. And it’s accidental precisely because Lewis’s snobbery keeps trying to suppress it.

When You Loathe, You Don’t Learn

The deeper lesson is this:

Contempt is the enemy of perception. You cannot understand what you’ve already decided to look down on.

And snobbery isn’t just contempt—it’s performative contempt. It replaces curiosity with judgment, nuance with posture.

Lewis may have thought he was satirizing Babbitt. But in the end, Babbitt survives him. Not because he’s admirable, but because Lewis’s attack was too shallow to be fatal. The satire is weaker than the subject. Because Babbitt, however foolish, is at least real. Lewis’s literary superiority complex is not.