Elmer gantry4/12/2023 It is set in the time period circa 1901 to about 1930, but the small town churches where most of the action takes place haven’t changed much. If you’re not an American, have never done time in Sunday School or sitting in pews, or you don’t quite understand why anyone cares about minute differences in the theological soup of Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Assemblies of God, Church of Christ, et al, then some of the nuances of the story may seem silly and irrelevant (and some of the incidents unbelievable), but you’ll certainly get a sense of the flavor of the times, a culture that still pervades America to this day. If you’ve grown up in that culture, even if you’re not a Protestant church-goer yourself, then you’ll recognize the people Sinclair Lewis is writing about. The first thing to understand about this book is that it is steeped in American Protestantism, which is of a peculiar and unique flavor (though it’s now been exported worldwide). Unsurprisingly, the book and the author were not very popular with the clergy or evangelical Christians. Thanks to this best-selling novel and the 1960 film, Elmer Gantry is synonymous today with the sort of evangelical huckster who’s familiar to Americans (and the world), but when Sinclair Lewis wrote it in 1927, it shocked the country with its cynical depiction of American religion. Elmer Gantry has been called the greatest, most vital, and most penetrating study of hypocrisy that has been written since Voltaire. His portrait of a golden-tongued evangelist who rises to power within his church – a saver of souls who lives a life of hypocrisy, sensuality, and ruthless self-indulgence – is also the record of a period, a reign of grotesque vulgarity, which but for Lewis would have left no record of itself. Today universally recognized as a landmark in American literature, Elmer Gantry scandalized readers when it was first published, causing Sinclair Lewis to be “invited” to a jail cell in New Hampshire and to his own lynching in Virginia. One-line summary: This satirical story about a Bible-thumping charlatan still annoys evangelical Christians, because it’s still spot-on.įirst published by Harcourt, Brace, in 1927 432 pages
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