Babbitt, World Figure

Badges worn by a smalltown delegation of realtors on their way to their state convention were lettered: WE ZOOM FOR ZENITH. And a banner proclaimed: ZENITH THE ZIP CITY--ZEAL, ZEST AND ZOWIE! Heading the delegation was one George Follansbee Babbitt ". . . 46 years old now, in April, 1920, and he made nothing in particular, neither butter nor shoes nor poetry, but he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay. His face was babyish . . . despite his wrinkles and the red spectacle-dents on the slopes of his nose. He was not fat but he was exceedingly well fed. ..." This description was intended by Author Sinclair ("Red") Lewis, who created the character and published the novel Babbitt in 1922, to represent a type of U. S. businessman. A vast reading public immediately accepted George Follansbee Babbitt as the go-getter incarnate. A school of Babbitt literature started, culminating in Booth Tarkington's The Plutocrat. "Babbitts," "Babbittry," "Babbittism'; became epithets applicable to all those who, like the prototype, were ever zooming for the Home Town, a Big-Business Administration, private real estate developments, the Rotary club or God. Last week Realtor Babbitt zoomed Author Lewis himself into an unanticipated world prominence. Aiding were heroes of three other Lewis books -- (Mar tin) Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry (Sam), Dodsworth, accepted by the same vast public as typical of the U. S. scientist, prelate and minor tycoon, respectively. But Babbitt remained foremost among them as a representative of U. S. citizenry and U. S. literature, having been more translated* and being more lipworthy in name. George Follansbee Babbitt was recognized as a world synonym for Homo Americanus when, last week, Author Lewis was awarded the Nobel prize for literature, biggest & best literary honor on earth. Tall, spindly, brass-haired, pock-marked Sinclair Lewis was born Feb. 7, 1885, in Sauk Center, Minn. His father, a country physician, had migrated from Connecticut, so at the proper age young Sinclair went to Yale. But at the beginning of his fourth year, he deserted college to become janitor for a socialistic Utopia called Helicon Hall which had just been founded in New Jersey by Upton Sinclair, radical novelist. Poor, Sinclair Lewis lived by writing children's verse and squib jokes for magazines until he obtained an assistant editorship on the now defunct monthly Transatlantic Tales. He left that position to seek another in the building of the Panama Canal but, failing that, returned obscurely to Yale for his degree. He became a newsgatherer first in New Haven, later elsewhere. But in streetcars and on commuting trains he appeased something that was gnawing within him by writing fiction, mostly pot boilers. In 1914 he published Our Mr. Wrenn, his first novel. That same year he married Grace Livingstone Hegger, wandered with her from coast to coast, getting newspaper jobs and writing novels in his spare time. During this period he published The Trail of the Hawk, The Job, The Innocents, Free Air. Then he borrowed $500 from his father, retired from other work to a lodging house in Washington, D. C. and wrote Main Street (1920). Its success was immediate; the title phrase and Sinclair Lewis became national bywords. Some 50,000 copies sold the first two months. (Last week the total was up to 525,000 copies.) In 1928 he was divorced and soon after married Dorothy Thompson, Berlin correspondent of the New York Evening Post. By each wife he has a child--Wells Sinclair, 13, and Michael, four months. The Prize. Nobel prizes--for achievement in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and Peace--are awarded annually by an institute founded by the late Alfred Bernhard Nobel (1833-96), Swedish oil tycoon, inventor of dynamite and ballistite. First awards were made in 1901. The five annual winners divide equally the interest on Nobel's huge estate. This year each share amounts to $46,350. Last year Author Lewis testified in court that his 1930 income would not exceed $10,000. The financial zoom his prize money gives him was somewhat spoiled last week when the first Mrs. Lewis, soon as she heard the news, applied in court for $800 per month more alimony. Impossible to spoil, however, is the zoom for Author Lewis of being the first U. S. citizen on the list distinguished by such names as Frederick Mistral, Gerhart Hauptmann, Remain Rolland, Knut Hamsun, Anatole France, William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Henri Bergson, Sigrid Undset, Thomas Mann.

In 1916 Author Lewis refused the $1,000 Pulitzer prize for his novel Arrowsmith. Last week he accepted the Nobel award, saying: "I feel the highest honor and gratification." He explained "the enormous difference between the two prizes. The Nobel prize is an international prize with no strings attached. . . . The Pulitzer prize, on the other hand, is cramped by the provision . . . that [it] shall be given 'for the American novel published during the year which shall best present the wholesome atmosphere of American life and the highest standard of American manners and manhood.' This suggests not actual literary merit, but an obedience to whatever code of good form may chance to be popular at the moment."

A prolific, boisterous talker, Author Lewis last week showed interviewers some of the bitter humor which once prompted him, after fame was his, to sit through a dinner of Yale classmates waiting for them to ask him to speak. When they did, he reminded them of the scant attention they had paid him at college, told them to go-to-hell. Last week he answered reportorial questions with such replies as these : "Hell, I don't expose things. I'm a novelist, I hope." "I don't know what the hell this coun try needs." "I shall use [the prize money] to sup port a well-known young American author and his family and to enable him to continue writing." He meant himself, of course, but in some places he was misunderstood. Ponderously one Berlin editorialist wrote : "The announcement that Lewis will hand the money over to a ... poor American writer is ... an unprecedentedly magnanimous action."

*Into 12 languages: German, Swedish, Polish, Hungarian, Danish, Norwegian, Czech, French, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Hebrew.

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