Babbitt

Every night, just before he wakes, George Babbitt dreams of a fairy child waiting for him in a garden no one else can find. Every morning he wakes into Zenith instead: the alarm clock, the safety razor, the city of towers built by men exactly like him. Sinclair Lewis watched this man so closely that his name entered the dictionary: Babbittry, the art of mistaking conformity for ambition. Babbitt is not cruel, nor stupid; he is only afraid of standing apart from the Boosters' Club, and that ordinary fear turns out to be the most dangerous thing about him. When his closest friend shoots his own wife and is arrested, Babbitt tries rebellion: an affair he cannot enjoy, opinions he cannot hold. He goes home grateful for the walls. Then his son breaks every rule Babbitt spent his life enforcing, and Babbitt, who has never once done what he wanted, finds he cannot bring himself to stop him. It is the saddest permission in American fiction, offered a generation too late to do the man who gives it any good.