In the fall of 1920, Sinclair Lewis began a novel set in a fast-growing city with the heart and mind of a small town. For the center of his cutting satire of American business he created the bustling, shallow, and myopic George F. Babbitt, the epitome of middle-class mediocrity. The novel cemented Lewis's prominence as a social commentator.

Babbitt basks in his pedestrian success and the popularity it has brought him. He demands high moral standards from those around him while flirting with women, and he yearns to have rich friends while shunning those less fortunate than he. But...

Richard Lingeman vividly recreates the momentous years between VJ Day in 1945 and the beginning of the Korean War in 1950--America's postwar period, the "age of anxiety" characterized by the onset of the Red Scare and a nascent resistance to the growing Cold War consensus.

The psychological hangover of World War II merged with burgeoning anti-communist paranoia and created a dark mood, a "postwar noir" phenomenon. The Noir Forties saw the arrival of McCarthyism and a bleak distortion of American political culture. Lingeman traces the attitudes, hopes and fears, prejudices, and collective...