Elmer Gantry

“Practise what you preach.” Meet Elmer Gantry– a hypocritical preacher in relentless pursuit of worldly pleasure and power. Gantry is a golden-tongued evangelist who rises to power within his church–a saver of souls who lives a life of duplicity sensuality and ruthless self-indulgence. Sinclair Lewis through this satiric examination of evangelical religion has aptly captured the growing cultural and political tension during the 1920s between the forces of secularism and fundamentalism. “Elmer Gantry” is the only record of the reign of grotesque vulgarity. The scandalous controversy stirred by the book even caused Lewis to be ‘invited’ to a jail cell in New Hampshire and to his own lynching in Virginia. Elmer Gantry has been called the greatest most vital and most penetrating study of hypocrisy that has been written since the works of Voltaire.