Philip Roth on American consciousness

"It's not as though Marx or Freud or Darwin or Stalin or Hitler or Mao had never happened--it's as though Sinclair Lewis had not happened. It's, he thought, as though Babbitt had never been written. It's as though not even that most basic level of imaginative thought had been admitted into consciousness to cause the slightest disturbance." -- Philip Roth, The Human Stain