Word: knocker
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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...
Among others banged by Brass Knocker Kenney...
Charles Dillon ("Casey") Stengel has a deeply lined, hawklike face that is hard to forget. He has wiry, bowed legs, a workaday wit, and an air of mock modesty. "I'm an apple-knocker," he likes to say, "and I'm against all city slickers." He was also quite a ballplayer in his day. Under the late great John J. McGraw of the Giants, he smashed a crucial home run in the 1923 World Series, and vigorously thumbed his nose at the Yankees all the way round the bases. The mantle of dignity is one article of clothing...
Said Honest Jim: "I certainly was astonished in the streets of our lovely little city, the other day-a knocker...
...Wilderness. But while it lasted and whil the Age of Opulence covered the land with its fertilizing flood, Americans floated and liked it. The Booster and the Hustler appeared, to do battle with the Knocker. For there were knockers. Many of the long-haired critics had fled prosperity in favor of poverty in Paris. In London, the most important of them, Poet Thomas Stearns Eliot, found a name for the period's typical man: "Apeneck Sweeney." He called the age's greatest poem simply: The Waste Land...