In The American Adam, R. B. W. Lewis discusses the emergence on the American scene in the second half of the nineteenth century of a new Euro- American subjectivity, “a radically new personality, the hero of the new adventure: an individual emancipated from history, happily bereft of ancestry, untouched and undefiled by the usual inheritance of family and race; an individual standing alone, self- reliant and self- propelling, ready to confront whatever awaited him with the aid of his own unique and inherent resources.” This new individuated subjectivity's emergence and rise to hegemony, contrary to R. B. W. Lewis's description, was produced by mass culture and by the (industrial) capitalistic, social, and technological transformation that was occurring in the United States during the last three decades of the nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth century. “Mass culture,” writes Félix Guattari, “produces […] standardized individuals, linked to one another in accordance with hierarchical systems, value systems, [and] systems of submission.” It produces a condition that destroys capacities, causes “the loss of knowledge that results from the exteriorization of knowledge in machines and apparatus,” and leads to a “generalized proletarianization.” In the transformation of the United States from a producer- oriented society to a consumer- oriented society, an urban, business civilization, along with a social conformist, middle- class subjectivity, emerged and became normal. This business civilization superseded the liberal, Protestant, educated, upper- middle- class, semi- aristocratic subjectivity or social order, which not only had ruled the United States for centuries and which believed in a certain moral integrity but also had its own limitations when it came to economic and social equality, when it came to knowing the foreign and domestic other.

Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt is one of the first American novels to specifically identify and focus on this new Euro- American subjectivity, the typical, standardized “white” middleclass American citizen of the 1920s. “The novel seemed absolutely new,” writes Mark Schorer, “unlike anything that had come before it.” Later, John O'Hara would write, “Lewis was born to write Babbitt's story […] All the other novelists and journalists and Babbitt himself were equally blind to Babbitt and Zenith and the United States of America until 1922.”