Some might even believe that by introducing Babbitt as a materialist booster Lewis is criticizing boosterism. However, in his book Sinclair Lewis: An American Life, ples that demonstrate Lewis’s materialism. One of them is that in an 1908 editorial titled the “Needful Knocker” Lewis himself seems to idealize boosterism presenting it as the opposite of Knocking: “The booster’s enthusiasm is the motive force which builds up our American cities. Granted. In summary then, we do not wish to knock the booster, but we certainly do wish to boost the knocker” (142). 29 For all that, this quotation and others rebut what some critics claim about Lewis’ denunciation of boosterism. 30 Still, in general, Lewis might have deep concerns about materialism, and in particular, for the reason that he had undergone a financial crisis: it took a long time before his work paid off.
In Theodore Dreiser: A Primary Bibliography and Reference Guide, Donald Pizer, Richard Dowell, and Frederic Rusch indicate that one “permanent [center] of Dreiser criticism was his naturalism” and hence they define Dreiser’s Naturalism as “Darwinian materialistic determinism in theme and crude massiveness in technique” (Pizer et al
Whatever implications boosterism might suggest, it cannot be acquitted of being merciless. The idea of delineating business as an agency of mercilessness and exploitation (i.e. boosterism) is uttered by Karl Marx’ “Capital I”: “The expropriation of the immediate producers is accomplished with merciless vandalism […] capitalistic private property, which rests on exploitation of the nominally free labour of others (1986, p. 209). Continue reading But the hated knocker’s jibes are the check necessary to guide that force