Background
Lewis researched the novel by observing the work of various preachers in Kansas City in his so-called "Sunday School" meetings on Wednesdays. He first worked with William L. "Big Bill" Stidger, pastor of the Linwood Boulevard Methodist Episcopal Church in Kansas City, Missouri. Stidger introduced Lewis to many other clergymen, including the Reverend Leon Milton Birkhead, a Unitarian and an agnostic. Lewis preferred the liberal Birkhead to the conservative Stidger, and on his second visit to Kansas City, Lewis chose Birkhead as his guide. 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, which is now the cathedral of the Episcopal Diocese of West Missouri. [2] [3] Lewis finished the book while mending a broken leg on Jackfish Island in Rainy Lake, Minnesota.
The character of Sharon Falconer was based on events in the career of the radio evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, who founded the Pentecostal Christian denomination known as the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel in 1927.
Synopsis
The novel tells the story of a young, narcissistic, womanizing college athlete who abandons his early ambition to become a lawyer. The legal profession does not suit the unethical Gantry. After college, he attends a Baptist seminary, and he is ordained as a Baptist minister. While managing to hide certain sexual indiscretions, he is thrown out of the seminary before completing his bachelor of divinity because he is too drunk to attend a church where he is supposed to preach.
After several years as a traveling salesman of farm equipment, he becomes a confidante of Sharon Falconer, a popular motivational speaker and evangelist with a "road church" show. Gantry becomes her lover, but loses both her and his position when she and scores of attendants are killed in a tragic fire in her tent tabernacle. After this catastrophe, he briefly acts as a "New Thought" evangelist, and eventually becomes a Methodist minister. He marries a local parishioner, although he is unhappy with her sexual frigidity, and uses her for appearances only. Years later the Methodist leadership awards him a larger congregation in Lewis's fictional city of Zenith. With his power and career in full tilt, Gantry manipulates local, state and national politics which involves police raids against bootleggers and bar patrons. His corruption and power hunger contribute to the downfall, physical injury, and even death of key people around him, including Frank Shallard, a sincere minister who questions the moral purpose of the evangelical church. Shallard, a former associate, is nearly beaten to death by a lynch squad of Gantry loyalists who were angered by his "atheistic" divergences in Christian teachings.
Especially ironic is the way he 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 (mainly sexual) immorality, when he has difficulty resisting sexual temptations.
Gantry's career comes close to a major scandal when one of his tawdry affairs turns out to be a husband and wife blackmail scheme. Gantry manages to be extracted from his potential downfall by his close friend and political alliance with a powerful lawyer and private detective agency. A thoroughly repentant Gantry swears to abstain from his sinful proclivities but, true to form, notices a younger woman during his sermon.
Reception
On publication in 1927, Elmer Gantry created a public furor. The book was banned in Boston and other cities and denounced from pulpits across the United States. [4] One cleric suggested that Lewis should be imprisoned for five years, and there were also threats of physical violence against the author. Evangelist Billy Sunday called Lewis "Satan's cohort". [5]
However, the book was a commercial success. It was the best-selling work of fiction in America for the year 1927, according to Publishers Weekly. [6]
Mark Schorer, then of the University of California, Berkeley, 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." Schorer also says that, while researching the book, Lewis attended two or three church services every Sunday while in Kansas City, and that: "He took advantage of every possible tangential experience in the religious community." The result is a novel that satirically represents the religious activity of America in evangelistic circles and the attitudes of the 1920s toward it.
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 based his observations of American culture on Lewis's novels.
Elmer Gantry appears as a minor character in two later, lesser-known Lewis novels: The Man Who Knew Coolidge and Gideon Planish . George Babbitt, the namesake of one of Lewis' better-known novels, appears in Elmer Gantry briefly during an encounter at the Zenith Athletic Club.
Harry Sinclair Lewis was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. In 1930, he became the first author from the United States to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters." Lewis wrote six popular novels: Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927), Dodsworth (1929), and It Can't Happen Here (1935).
William Ashley Sunday was an American outfielder in baseball's National League and widely considered the most influential American evangelist during the first two decades of the 20th century.
Babbitt (1922), by Sinclair Lewis, is a satirical novel about American culture and society that critiques the vacuity of middle class life and the social pressure toward conformity. The controversy provoked by Babbitt was influential in the decision to award the Nobel Prize in Literature to Lewis in 1930. The novel has been filmed twice, once as a silent in 1924 and remade as a talkie in 1934.
Winnemac is a fictional U.S. state invented by the writer Sinclair Lewis. His novel Babbitt takes place in Zenith, its largest city. Winnemac is also a setting for Gideon Planish, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, and Dodsworth.
A revival meeting is a series of Christian religious services held to inspire active members of a church body to gain new converts and to call sinners to repent. Nineteenth-century Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon said, "Many blessings may come to the unconverted in consequence of a revival among Christians, but the revival itself has to do only with those who already possess spiritual life." These meetings are usually conducted by churches or missionary organizations throughout the world. Notable historic revival meetings were conducted in the United States by evangelist Billy Sunday and in Wales by evangelist Evan Roberts. Revival services occur in local churches, brush arbor revivals, tent revivals, and camp meetings.
The Damnation of Theron Ware is an 1896 novel by American author Harold Frederic. Set in upstate New York, the novel presents a portrait of 19th-century provincial United States, the religious life of its ethnic groups, and its intellectual and artistic culture. It is written in a realistic style. According to Publishers Weekly, it was the fifth-best-selling book in the United States in 1896.
Mark Schorer was an American writer, critic, and scholar born in Sauk City, Wisconsin.
Tent revivals, also known as tent meetings, are a gathering of Christian worshipers in a tent erected specifically for revival meetings, evangelism, and healing crusades. Tent revivals have had both local and national ministries.
Elmer Gantry is a 1960 American drama film about a confidence man and a female evangelist selling religion to small-town America. Adapted by director Richard Brooks, the film is based on the 1927 novel of the same name by Sinclair Lewis, and stars Burt Lancaster, Jean Simmons, Arthur Kennedy, Shirley Jones and Patti Page.
Elmer Gantry's Velvet Opera, at various times also known as "Velvet Opera", was a British rock band active in the late 1960s. Members of the band, Richard Hudson, John Ford and Paul Brett, would later become members of The Strawbs, Hudson Ford and Stretch.
Gantry is a musical with a book by Peter Bellwood, lyrics by Fred Tobias, and music by Stanley Lebowsky.
The Profits of Religion: An Essay in Economic Interpretation is a nonfiction book, first published in 1917, by the American novelist and muck-raking journalist Upton Sinclair. It is a snapshot of the religious movements in the U.S. before its entry into World War I.
Edwin Othello Excell, commonly known as E. O. Excell, was a prominent American publisher, composer, song leader, and singer of music for church, Sunday school, and evangelistic meetings during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of the significant collaborators in his vocal and publishing work included Sam P. Jones, William E. Biederwolf, Gipsy Smith, Charles Reign Scoville, J. Wilbur Chapman, W. E. M. Hackleman, Charles H. Gabriel and D. B. Towner.
Elmer Gantry is a 2007 American opera by Robert Aldridge to a libretto by Herschel Garfein based on the 1927 novel by Sinclair Lewis of the same name. The Nashville Opera presented the world première in November 2007.
Mantrap is a 1926 novel by Sinclair Lewis. One of Lewis's two unsuccessful novels of the 1920s, the other being The Man Who Knew Coolidge. Mantrap is the story of New York lawyer Ralph Prescott's journey into the wilds of Saskatchewan, and of his adventures there. The novel spawned two separate film adaptations, Mantrap (1926), and Untamed (1940).
Pentecostalism is a renewal movement within Protestant Christianity that places special emphasis on a direct personal relationship with God and experience of God through the baptism with the Holy Spirit. For Christians, this event commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the followers of Jesus Christ, as described in the second chapter of the Book of Acts. Pentecostalism was established in Kerala, India at the start of the 20th century.
The Man Who Knew Coolidge is a 1928 satirical novel by Sinclair Lewis. It features the return of several characters from Lewis' previous works, including George Babbitt and Elmer Gantry. Additionally, it sees a return to the familiar territory of Lewis' fictional American city of Zenith, in the state of Winnemac. Presented as six long, uninterrupted monologues by Lowell Schmaltz, a travelling salesman in office supplies, the eponymous first section was originally published in The American Mercury in 1927.
James Caughey was a Methodist minister and evangelist who was active in the United States, England and Canada. An imposing and effective preacher, he conducted highly emotional revival meetings at which many of his audience were converted or reaffirmed their faith. This brought him into some conflict with the more respectable members of the Methodist church in Britain.
Canaan Land is a 2020 American comedy-drama film written and directed by Richard Rossi and starring Richard Rossi as Brother Billy and Rebecca Holden as Sister Sara Sunday. It is based on the novel of the same name by Rossi. Like the novel it was based on, the film generated controversy at the time of its release from evangelical religious groups, who took issue with Rossi exposing fraudulent faith-healing techniques of well-known televangelists.
This Tender Land is a book written by William Kent Krueger and published by Atria Books in September 2019. Krueger had written a companion novel to Ordinary Grace, that was accepted and revised, but he pulled it at the last minute and revised it substantially over the next four years, incorporating elements from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the Odyssey. After these lengthy reviews, Krueger said "I am deeply in love with this book. I love it as much, if not more, than 'Ordinary Grace'."
