Babbitt

New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922. First edition, first printing, first state. Publisher's full blue cloth, blocked and ruled in orange. Octavo. 401, [5] pp. (advertisements). No dust jacket, missing ffep, lightly pressed corners, staining on cloth, sun fading on spine, light edge-wear, small stain on text block, still a good, honest copy, lacking the ffep and dust jacket .

Sinclair Lewis was the first American author to win the Nobel Prize in literature, which was awarded "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters." In the academy's presentation speech, special attention was paid to Babbitt. In his Nobel Lecture, Lewis praised Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, and other contemporaries, but also lamented that "in America most of us -- not readers alone, but even writers -- are still afraid of any literature which is not a glorification of everything American, a glorification of our faults as well as our virtues," and that America is "the most contradictory, the most depressing, the most stirring, of any land in the world today."

This copy is a first state of that novel given special attention by the academy, confirmed by "Supposing Purdy" on line 4 of page 49, and "my fellow human" on line 5 of the same page. The later second issue has "Supposing Lyte" on line 4, and "any fellow human" on line 5. These changes were made during the first printing.