Public Books
Carl Abbott
Public Books
a magazine of ideas, arts, and scholarship
  • Essays
  • Interviews
  • Sections
    • View All
    • Anthropology & Religion
    • Art
    • Borderlands
    • Capitalism
    • Digital Humanities
    • Film
    • Global Black History
    • Higher Education
    • Literary Fiction
    • Literature in Translation
    • Poetry
    • Politics
    • Print/Screen
    • Sociology
    • Sports
    • Systems and Futures
    • Technology
    • TV
    • Urbanism
    • Videogames
  • Series
    • View All
    • B-Sides
    • The Book That Made Me
    • Crisis Cities
    • An Engineer Reads a Novel
    • On Our Nightstands
    • Public Streets
    • Public Thinker
    • Quizzical
    • Shoptalk
    • Syllabi
    • Virtual Roundtables
    • @X
  • Partners
  • Donate
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
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

  • Visit website

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 ...

Get Our Weekly Newsletter

Most Viewed

  • Re-embodying Palestinian Memory
  • Public Thinker: Hua Hsu on Reading until You See...
  • How to Hear Campus Free Speech
  • James Baldwin, Here and Elsewhere
  • The Necessity of an Alternative

Subscribe to RSS

Support Public Books

Editors’ Pick

  • Preexisting Conditions: What 2020 Reveals about Our Urban Future
    Thomas J. Sugrue 11.16.2020
  • About
  • Authors
  • Submissions
  • Advertise
  • Events
  • Contact
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram

Public Books Logo
© 2021 Public Books.TM All Rights Reserved