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Elmer Gantry is a 1927 satirical novel written by Sinclair Lewis that presents aspects of the religious activity of the United States in fundamentalist and evangelistic circles and the attitudes of the 1920s public toward it.[not verified in body] Reverend Dr. Elmer Gantry, the protagonist, is attracted by drinking, chasing women, and making easy money (although eventually renouncing tobacco and alcohol). In the novel's fictional world, after various forays into smaller fringe churches, Gantry becomes a major moral and political force in the Methodist Church despite his hypocrisy and serial sexual indiscretions.[1][non-primary source needed]
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Biographer Mark Schorer states that while researching the book, Lewis attended two or three church services every Sunday while in Kansas City,[citation needed] and that, "He took advantage of every possible tangential experience in the religious community."[This quote needs a citation] According to others,[who?] Lewis researched the novel by observing the work of various preachers in Kansas City in his so-called "Sunday School" meetings on Wednesdays.[citation needed] There, he first worked with William L. "Big Bill" Stidger,[2] pastor of the Linwood BoulevardMethodist Episcopal Church.[citation needed] Stidger introduced Lewis to many other clergymen,[citation needed] thus Lewis engaged with Unitarian pastor L. M. Birkhead[2] (an agnostic[citation needed]). Lewis preferred the liberal Birkhead to the conservative Stidger, and on his second visit to Kansas City, Lewis chose Birkhead as his guide.[citation needed] Other Kansas City ministers Lewis interviewed included Burris Jenkins, Earl Blackman, I. M. Hargett, Bert Fiske, and Robert Nelson Horatio Spencer, who was rector of Grace and Holy Trinity Church (now the cathedral of the Episcopal Diocese of West Missouri).[citation needed]
Experts have noted[who?] that George Babbitt, the namesake of one of Lewis' better-known novels, appears in Elmer Gantry (briefly, during an encounter at the Zenith Athletic Club),[citation needed] and that the Elmer Gantry character appears as a minor character in two later, lesser-known Lewis novels, The Man Who Knew Coolidge and Gideon Planish.[citation needed]
The novel tells the story of the young, womanizing college athlete, Elmer Gantry, who abandons an early ambition to become a lawyer. After college,[clarification needed] he attends a Baptist seminary,[clarification needed] and is ordained as a minister. He successfully hides sexual involvements that are prohibited,[clarification needed] but is thrown out of the seminary before completing his bachelor of divinity because he is too drunk to appear at a church where he is supposed to preach.
After several years as a traveling salesman of farm equipment, Gantry becomes a confidante of Sharon Falconer, a popular evangelist and motivational speaker[clarification needed] who has her own traveling "road church". Gantry becomes her lover, but she and scores of individuals attending one of her meetings are killed in a catastrophic fire in her tent tabernacle, and so Gantry loses both relationship and position. After the tragedy, he briefly acts as a "New Thought" evangelist,[clarification needed] and eventually becomes a Methodist minister.
Gantry marries a local parishioner. Although he is unhappy with her sexual frigidity, he remains with her for sake of appearances. Years later, Methodist leaders award him a larger congregation in the city of Zenith. With his career and power at their peak, Gantry manipulates local, state and national political figures, resulting in police raids against bootleggers and bar patrons.
Gantry's corruption and power hunger[clarification needed] contribute to the downfall, physical injury, and even death of key people around him, including a former associate, Frank Shallard, a sincere minister who questions the moral purpose of his church. Shallard is nearly beaten to death by Gantry loyalists who are angered by perceived "atheistic" divergences from Christian teachings.
Especially ironic are the ways Gantry champions love, an emotion of which he seems incapable in his sermons; preaches against ambition, when he is so patently ambitious; and organizes crusades against sexual immorality, when he has difficulty resisting such temptations.[editorialising]
Gantry's career comes close to a major scandal when one of his affairs turns out to involve a husband and wife blackmail team. Gantry is helped in avoiding potential downfall by a close friend, and via political alliance with a powerful lawyer and private detective agency.[who?] A thoroughly repentant Gantry swears to abstain from his sinful proclivities. As the book closes, Gantry notices a younger woman during a closing sermon scene.
Publication history
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Sinclair's Elmer Gantry was a commercial success, and was the best-selling work of fiction in America for 1927 (according to Publishers Weekly).[3] However, on its publication, it created a public furor—it was banned in Boston and in other cities,[4][5][better source needed][6] and denounced from pulpits across the United States.[citation needed] Contemporary Sinclair Lewis biographer Mark Schorer notes that one cleric suggested Lewis be imprisoned for five years; others note that evangelist Billy Sunday threatened to beat him up and called him "Satan's cohort", and Lewis reportedly received an invitation to his own lynching.[5][better source needed]
Criticism
This section needs expansion with: literary critical response, contemporary and modern, relating to this classic work. You can help by adding to it. (October 2024)
Lewis biographer Schorer notes, "The forces of social good and enlightenment as presented in Elmer Gantry are not strong enough to offer any real resistance to the forces of social evil and banality."[This quote needs a citation] Schorer concludes, in view of Lewis' research, that the novel satirically represents the religious activity of America in evangelistic circles and the attitudes of the 1920s toward it.[citation needed]
A Broadway play by Patrick Kearney opened on August 7, 1928 at the Playhouse Theatre, where it ran for 48 performances; the cast included Edward J. Pawley (later of Big Town fame) as Elmer Gantry, and Vera Allen as Sister Sharon Falconer.[according to whom?]
A 1970 Broadway musical adaptation, titled Gantry, opened and closed on the same night, February 14, 1970.[according to whom?]
A 1998 play adaptation by Richard Rossi was performed in Los Angeles and broadcast on TV October 24, 1998.[citation needed]
In November 2007, an opera, also titled Elmer Gantry, by Robert Aldridge and Herschel Garfein, premiered in the James K. Polk Theater in Nashville, Tennessee.[9]
Related inspired works
Shortly after the publication of Elmer Gantry, H. G. Wells published a widely syndicated newspaper article titled "The New American People", in which he largely bases his observations of American culture on Lewis's novels, including Elmer Gantry.[citation needed]
After the 1998 play by Richard Rossi, that playwright was cast in the lead role of Elmer Gantry in a film remake of the 1960 Academy Award-winning film of the same name, slated to be directed by Amin Q. Chaudhri.[10] Chaudhri sought investors for an initial $20 million budget,[11] but as of this date,[when?] a remake has never been made.[citation needed] Rossi then began writing his own story of an Elmer Gantry-ish evangelist in a contemporary setting, which became the film Canaan Land.[12]
Citations
^Lewis, Sinclair (1927). "Elmer Gantry". Retrieved 2015-11-13.[better source needed] As a primary source, and lacking edition and publisher information, this source does not support the lead content (without editorial original research).
^ abTrollinger, William Vance (1990). God's Empire: William Bell Riley and Midwestern Fundamentalism. History of American Thought and Culture. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. p. 3. ISBN9780299127145. Retrieved 2015-11-13. Sinclair Lewis began the process of writing his classic satire of popular religion, Elmer Gntry, by doing some research into the current state of Christianity in America. As part of his preparation, Lewis went to Kansas City in January 1926 and immersed himself in the religious life of the community. While the prominent New York fundamentalist John Roach Straton seems to have been the initial model for Lewis' protagonist, in Kansas City the author fleshed out the character of the infamous Gantry with material from the lives of Methodist minister William "Big Bill" Stidger and Unitarian pastor L. M. Birkhead. In the process, Lewis became quite friendly with Birkhead and his wife. After accumulating piles of notes, and armed with a twenty-thousand-word outline, Lewis withdrew with the Birkheads to a summer resort in northern Minnesota, where he began to write the novel.[superscript 1] / While in Minnesota Lewis apparently concluded that he needed more data for his portrait of a fundamentalist preacher. He thus made efforts to interview, William Bell Riley, strident fundamentalist, and pastor of the first Baptist Church of Minneapolis. As Riley recounted later, 'when L. M. Birkhead, Universalist Pastor of Kansas City, and Sinclair Lewis brought their half heads together in order to produce the book entitled, Elmer Gantry, they . . . invited me to spend a week with them on Long Lake . . . in the hopes of getting something on me that they might work into that rotten volume.' Fortunately, Riley observed, 'God, who knows all things, knew they were coming,' and so filled Riley's week with commitments that... [he] was forced to decline the invitation.
^Hackett, Alice Payne and Burke, James Henry (1977). 80 Years of Bestsellers: 1895 - 1975. New York: R.R. Bowker Company. p. 103. ISBN0835209083.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
^NYT Staff (April 13, 1927). "Boston Bans Sale of 'Elmer Gantry'". The New York Times. Retrieved 29 October 2024. [Subtitle] Will Prosecute Any Who Sell Lewis Novel Under Law Against 'Indecent and Obscene' Books. Ten More Under Scrutiny. Publishers Will Hand to District Attorney Today 57 Works Held as Frank as Lewis's.
Blake, John Tyler. Sinclair Lewis's Kansas City Laboratory: The Genesis of Elmer Gantry. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1999.[full citation needed]
Corder, Robert Gibson. Edward J. Pawley: Broadway's Elmer Gantry, Radio's Steve Wilson, and Hollywood's Perennial Bad Guy, Outskirts Press, 2006.[full citation needed]
Hutchisson, James M. The Rise of Sinclair Lewis, 1920–1930. University Park: Penn State University Press, 1996.[full citation needed]
Blake, Nelson Manfred. "How to Learn History from Sinclair Lewis and Other Uncommon Sources", in American Character and Culture in a Changing World: Some Twentieth-Century Perspectives. John A. Hague (ed.). Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1979. 111–23.[full citation needed]
Dixon, Wheeler. "Cinematic Adaptations of the Works of Sinclair Lewis", in Sinclair Lewis at 100: Papers Presented at a Centennial Conference, ed. Michael Connaughton. St. Cloud, MN: St. Cloud State University, 1985, pp. 191–200. OCLC15935871[full citation needed]
Higgs, Robert J. "Religion and Sports: Three Muscular Christians in American Literature", in American Sport Culture: The Humanistic Dimensions Wiley Lee Umphlett (ed.). Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1985, pp. 226–34.[full citation needed]
Killough, George. "Elmer Gantry, Chaucer's Pardoner, and the Limits of Serious Words", in Sinclair Lewis: New Essays in Criticism. James M. Hutchisson (ed.). Troy, New York: Whitston, 1997. 162–74.[full citation needed]
Martin, Edward A. "The Mimic as Artist: Sinclair Lewis", in H. L. Mencken and the Debunkers. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1984. 115–38.[full citation needed]
Mayer, Gary H. "Love is More Than the Evening Star: A Semantic Analysis of Elmer Gantry and The Man Who Knew Coolidge", in American Bypaths: Essays in Honor of E. Hudson Long. Ed. Robert G. Collmer and Jack W. Herring. Waco: Baylor University Press, 1980. 145–66.[full citation needed]
Moore, James Benedict. "The Sources of Elmer Gantry", in The New Republic, 143 (8 August 1960): 17–18.[full citation needed]
Piacentino, Edward J. "Babbittry Southern Style: T. S. Stribling's Unfinished Cathedral". Markham Review 10 (1981): 36–39.
Prioleau, Elizabeth S. "The Minister and the Seductress in American Fiction: The Adamic Myth Reduz", Journal of American Culture, 16.4 (1993): 1–6.
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