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Elmer Gantry

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Elmer Gantry

By: Sinclair Lewis
Narrated by: Anthony Heald
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Elmer Gantry is the portrait of a silver-tongued evangelist who rises to power within his church, yet lives a life of hypocrisy, sensuality, and ruthless self-indulgence.

The title character starts out as a greedy, shallow, philandering Baptist minister, turns to evangelism, and eventually becomes the leader of a large Methodist congregation. Throughout the novel, Gantry encounters fellow religious hypocrites. Although often exposed as a fraud, Gantry is never fully discredited.

When Elmer Gantry was first published in 1927, it created a public furor. Now it is considered a landmark in American literature and one of the most penetrating studies of hypocrisy in modern literature. The novel also represents the evangelistic activity of America in the 1920s and people’s attitudes toward it.

©1927 , © renewed 1954 by Michael Lewis. © 1970 by New American Library (a division of Penguin Books) (P)2008 Blackstone Audio, Inc. Classics Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Psychological Fiction
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Critic reviews

“Elmer Gantry is charismatic without being likable, which makes voicing him a tricky business for Anthony Heald…Heald’s pacing, his accents, [and] his narrative drive are all excellent.”

(AudioFile)

“What always made Lewis’s novels richer than mere satire was the affection he so clearly felt even for the people and institutions he was most eager to expose. As awful as Gantry is, we can’t suppress a sneaking liking for him, and neither can his author…So much a product of its own historic moment, it turns out to be a book for our time as well, and probably for all times.”

(Brooke Allen, author of Twentieth-Century Attitudes)

“The background of Elmer Gantry is the religious activity of America in evangelistic cirles and the attitudes of the nineteen twenties toward it. The religious life in the United States had fallen into a condition of listless and at the same time enthusiastic decay…What the Lewis novel pictures, in part, is the confusion of…the material and the spiritual and the consequent corruption of both.”

(Mark Schorer, author of Sinclair Lewis: An American Life)
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I much preferred Main Street and Babbitt because there is nothing to like about the protagonist in Elmer Gantry, nor any of the other characters really (except maybe Jim). Elmer is a despicable person and I didn't have much sympathy for the rest either. Sinclair Lewis writes brilliantly though and drawers the reader in to very real scenarios.

excellently read

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Written over 90 years ago, Elmer Gantry still manages to entertain and challenge. The main character is a buffoon who uses people up. Sinclair Lewis's dialogue, although firmly of its time is authentic and well written.

BTW, listen for the satirical self criticism toward the end of the novel.

Amazing use of description and dialogue

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I doubt that this book goes down well in the American bible belt, but it does pander to my own preconceptions about religion and evangelism.
I didn't feel that it aged much.

Worth listening to.

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Like Lewis's 'It Can't Happen Here' this story of a big, magnetic, narcissistic, fake and unscrupulous leader rings uncomfortably true. The ignorant mob of followers babbling about godliness and spouting hatred against 'libruls', (sic) 'communists' and 'atheists' (without really understanding any of those terms) is horribly familiar too. Despite the horror of it (and there is one terrible scene of mob violence, sneakily stirred up by Gantry) Lewis also manages to inject some humour. He has a sharp eye for the self-deluded and for the ridiculous side of life. The routine hypocrisy of small-town religious types, all keen prohibitionists in public and nearly all drinking on the sly, is funny but also hateful.

The sheer despicability of Gantry kept me reading (what will he do next?) - though I winced at the amount of 'collateral', of human beings used, betrayed and abandoned as Gantry builds his career of lies. He manages to control his desire for a smoke and a drink, at least for most of the time, since many in his church think of these habits as the gateway to Hell, but he has more trouble with lust, even when married. Every woman is adorable until he's had her, after which he starts to find her irritating. He has so little self-knowledge that he never gains insight into this pattern. His friends, too, are disposable.

Anthony Heald is a terrific reader. I can't imagine this being done better. Since listening to Lewis, I've found two marvellous new narrators - new to me, anyway - Anthony Heald and Grover Gardner, and will be looking out for their work in future.

A gripping story, still relevant, brilliantly read

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