Word: knocker
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Civilized Barbarian. Sinclair Lewis' works have become period pieces. But in his prime, Lewis had no peer as a knocker of "homo Americanibus." Sinclair Lewis wrote mainly about one man, George Follansbee Babbitt, of Zenith, the Zip town. George Babbitt was a helpless materialist whose one standard was money, a quavering conformist whose only security was found in the back-slapping approval of his fellow Rotarians. He lived in physical comfort greater than kings enjoyed in the past, but he rarely stopped to enjoy it, for he was a Hustler. He was ashamed of his secret dreams...
...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...