Babbitt shares thematic content with Lewis’s most famous work, Main Street: both are satires that reveal a fundamental emptiness at the core of American life, though Babbitt concerns itself more with the big city, while Main Street is more about small-town life, creating a nice complementary relationship with one another.
Satirist contemporaries of Lewis's include Aldous Huxley (Brave New World), Dorothy Parker (a poet, short fiction writer, and critic), and Mikhail Bulgakov (Heart of a Dog), among others.