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Carl Abbott
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Carl Abbott

Carl Abbott

Carl Abbott is professor emeritus of Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University. He is the author of several books on American cities and on science fiction, most recently Imagining Urban Futures: Cities in Science Fiction and What We Might Learn from Them (Wesleyan University Press, 2016). His shorter writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Domain Review, and CityLab. icon

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B-Sides: Sinclair Lewis’s “Babbitt”

By Carl Abbott

My family lived in a “flyover state” for five generations. I grew up in one of those middle American cities that Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt holds up to the light ...

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