F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) uses techniques associated with European modernism to display the empty and hollow undercurrent in American life in the years following World War I. It is one of the most influential masterpieces of the era.

Main Street (1920), Lewis's novel written just before Babbitt, is a satirical portrait of small-town American life based on Lewis's home town of Sauk Center, Minnesota.

A famous muckraking novel about the working conditions in a slaughterhouse, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) is one of the enduring satires of the early twentieth century. It greatly influenced Lewis's work.

Arthur Miller's play Death of a Salesman (1949) centers on the tragedy of Willy Loman, a salesman whose life becomes meaningless except for his love of his sons. It focuses on a very different kind of family. The play employs distinct melodramatic methods in order...