Word: cornplow
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...derided and denounced. His home town graciously forgave his insults, made him its favorite prodigal son. In a world of storm troopers and commissars, George Babbittand Red Lewisdid not look like such bad fellows after all. In The Prodigal Parents, Babbitt (this time called Fred Cornplow) was finally canonized by his creator. Wrote Lewis: "He is the eternal bourgeois, the bourjoyce, the burgher . . . and when he changes his mind, that crisis is weightier than Waterloo or Thermopylae." Sinclair Lewis, Knocker, had turned into Sinclair Lewis, Booster...
...choppy short stories than of his novels, The Prodigal Parents is notable only for the stern tone it adopts toward the Communist Party and for its sympathetic portrait of the type of U. S. businessman Lewis has previously satirized. The story revolves around the rebellion of Frederick William Cornplow, a plump, prosperous, middle-aged automobile dealer of Sachem Falls, N. Y., who is a dead ringer for Babbitt...
...unlike Babbitt, Fred Cornplow is harassed by two extraordinarily rude, extravagant, self-centred children who almost drive him crazy and then try to lock him in a sanitarium so he can recover the mental balance they have destroyed. Son Howard is a handsome, stupid, unprincipled college boy who is always borrowing money, wrecking his father's cars, and trying to lie his way out. Daughter Sara is a handsome, ill-natured poseur who becomes a Communist, falls in love with an agitator, overdraws her allowance of $1,000 a year and spends most of her time making poisonous remarks...