In his introduction to Critical Essays on Sinclair Lewis, Martin Bucco writes that the literary community reviewed Babbitt very positively and saw it as an improvement on Main Street (1920) despite the fact that: "Reviews in business and club magazines naturally remonstrated against Lewis's bestselling raillery of a 'standardized' American businessman discontented amid zippy fellow Rotarians, Realtors, and Boosters." H. L. Mencken and Rebecca West were among the most influential early critics to praise Babbitt. West wrote in the New Statesman that the novel "has that something extra, over and above, which makes the work of art."

In 1930, Lewis won the Nobel Prize, and this award secured the place of the novel as a classic in American and international literature. Afterwards, however, Lewis suffered a major decline in reputation from which he never fully recovered. He was possibly less successful during the 1930s because America was no...