If Mr. Sinclair Lewis’s fine novel, _Babbitt_, is simply the story of George F. Babbitt, the only adverse comment I can make upon it is to question whether that gentleman deserved such detailed and careful study. One thing is certain: he does not deserve it a whit more if, as some newspaper has asserted, there are ten million of him than if there is only one. But there are indications that Mr. Lewis intended also to depict the city of Zenith and to show Babbitt and his friends as typical of its spirit, to do with this novel for the city what he attempted to do in _Main Street_ for the village. True, there are circles above Babbitt, in which move William Eathorne, the banker (magnificently sketched), and the McKelveys (not realized at all). And one is made to feel intensely that beneath the all-too-articulate Babbitt and his friends are toiling, almost inarticulate masses. ‘At that moment in Zenith, three hundred and forty or fifty thousand Ordinary People were asleep, a vast unpenetrated shadow.’ Nevertheless, it appears to me that in Babbitt, Vergil Gunch, Howard Littlefield, and the others, Mr. Lewis intended to typify the dominant spirit of Zenith. Indeed, if they did not typify it, if they were not significant of anything greater than themselves, he would hardly have taken such pains to depict them. ‘Vergil Gunch summed it up: “Fact is, we’re mighty lucky to be living among a bunch of city-folks, that recognize artistic things and business punch equally. We’d feel pretty glum if we got stuck in some Main Street burg....”’ This sounds very like special pleading. Well, I recently spent a summer in Zenith. At least, it may well have been Zenith. It is in the same part of the Middle-West and it looks like the city Mr. Lewis describes. True, it has only 150,000 inhabitants, whereas Mr. Lewis claims 340,000 for his city. But Mr. Lewis is himself sufficiently of the Middle-West to be unreliable on this subject. And, to tell the truth, his city does not feel like a city of 340,000. The social items in its newspapers are too boisterous and unsophisticated; it has, apparently, neither orchestra nor art gallery. No, Mr. Lewis’s Zenith is my Zenith. But if this essay should happen to meet his eye, and he should protest that I have selected a city quite different from his, called it Zenith, and then set out to prove that it was not what he said it was, I can only reply that he may be right, but that if the Babbitts are not typical of a city of 150,000, still less are they likely to be of a city of 340,000.