Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

CHAPTER 12: BABBITT’S MIDDLETOWN

1. Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, Op. cit., page 260.

2. Ibid., page 261.

3. Ibid.

4. Laurie R. Godfrey (editor), Scientists Confront Creationism, New York: W. W. Norton, 1983, passim.

5. Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, New York: Knopf, 1963, page 126.

6. Ibid., page 125.

7. Ronald L. Numbers, Darwinism Comes to America, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998, pages 77–89.

8. Hofstadter, Op. cit., pages 124–125.

9. James M. Hutchisson, Introduction to: Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt, New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1922; Penguin edition, London, 1996, pages xiiff.

10. Ibid., pages viii–xi.

11. Ibid., xi.

12. Mark Schorer, Sinclair Lewis: An American Life, London: Heinemann, 1963, page 345. See also: Hutchisson, Op. cit., page xii.

13. Hutchisson, Op. cit., page xxvi.

14. Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1942; paperback, third edition, 1995, page 221.

15. Hutchisson, Op. cit., page xvii.

16. Schorer, Op. cit., pages 353–356.

17. Asa Briggs, The Birth of Broadcasting, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1961, page 65.

18. Theodore Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956, pages 40ff and 211.

19. Ibid., page 211.

20. Ibid.

21. Janice A. Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of the-Month Club, Literary Taste and Middle Class Desire, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997, pages 195–196.

22. Ibid., pages 221ff.

23. Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletowm: A Study in Contemporary American Culture, London: Constable, 1929, page vi.

24. Ibid., page 7.

25. Ibid., page 249.

26. Ibid., page 48.

27. Ibid., pages 53ff.

28. Ibid., page 83.

29. Ibid., page 115.

30. Ibid., page 532.

31. Ibid., page 36.

32. David Levering Lewis, When Harlem was in Vogue, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981, page 165.

33. Ibid., page 168.

34. See George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995, pages 396ff for a discussion.

35. Lewis, Op. cit., pages 91–92.

36. Hutchinson, Op. cit., pages 289–304 for a discussion of racial science in this context.

37. Ibid., pages 145–146. See also: Lewis, Op. cit., pages 34–35.

38. Lewis, Op. cit., page 33.

39. Ibid., pages 51ff.

40. Ibid., pages 67–71.

41. Hutchinson, Op. cit., page 396, which takes a critical approach to Locke.

42. Ibid., pages 170ff; see also Lewis, Op. cit., pages 115–116.

43. Lewis, Op. cit., pages 180ff.

44. Peterson, Op. cit., page 235.

45. Ibid., page 238.

46. Ibid., page 240.

47. Ibid., page 241.

48. Asa Briggs, Op. cit., page 65.

49. John Cain, The BBC: Seventy Years of Broadcasting, London: BBC, 1992, pages 11 and 20.

50. Ibid., pages 10–15.

51. Assembled from charts and figures given in Briggs, Op. cit., passim. Cain, Op. cit., page 13.

52. Briggs, Op. cit., page 14.

53. Radway, Op. cit., pages 219–220 and chapter 7, ‘The Scandal of the Middlebrow’, pages 221ff.

54. Cain, Op. cit., page 15.

55. Ibid., page 25.