Elmer Gantry

Death Threats and Bans

Sinclair Lewis published Elmer Gantry in March 1927, and the reaction was immediate and violent. Preachers across the United States denounced it from the pulpit. Cities banned it. Lewis received death threats. The Reverend Billy Sunday offered to thrash Lewis personally. An enterprising Kansas City reverend organized a campaign to have Lewis imprisoned. It was the most controversial American novel between The Scarlet Letter and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Lewis — who had won the Nobel Prize three years later — wore the controversy as a badge.

The novel follows Elmer Gantry from his college days through his emergence as a major evangelist and, at the novel’s end, a figure of national religious influence. Gantry is not simply a hypocrite: the word does not quite capture him, because a hypocrite knows the difference between what he professes and what he practices. Gantry is something more interesting — a man who periodically believes his own performance, who can be genuinely moved by the emotional climates he creates, and who is therefore more dangerous than a pure fraud because his sincerity is real, intermittent, and available as self-justification whenever he needs it.

Sharon Falconer and the Business of Revival

The novel’s best sections involve Sharon Falconer, the female evangelist with whom Gantry becomes partner and lover. Sharon is Gantry’s equal in charisma and his superior in self-deception: she has convinced herself of her own divine mission so completely that her obvious manipulations of her audience feel, to her, like genuine spiritual work. Lewis renders the revival meetings with documentary precision — the music, the emotional escalation, the moment of surrender — and the portrait of Sharon as simultaneously a genuine religious phenomenon and a business operator is the novel’s most complex achievement.

Sharon’s death in a fire — the temple collapses during a performance — is the novel’s pivot. Without her, Gantry proceeds through several more phases of religious entrepreneurship, each more successful than the last, ending as the minister of a major city church and a figure of civic importance. Lewis’s joke is that each scandal Gantry barely survives makes him more powerful, because the machine of American religious life is designed to absorb and recycle its own disgraces.

The Type That Keeps Returning

What made Elmer Gantry prophetically accurate rather than merely satirically savage is Lewis’s identification of a specifically American archetype: the man who combines genuine animal magnetism, total ethical flexibility, and intermittent sincere belief into something that the culture cannot quite categorize. He is not the calculated fraud of European fiction — the man who knows exactly what he is doing. He is the American original: the salesman who has sold himself his own pitch. The novel ends with Gantry calling down God’s wrath on sin and vice, his own sins and vices entirely suppressed, temporarily, behind the performance of righteous indignation — and the final line is: “But this very evening he had an assignation with a girl.” American religious life has been producing Elmer Gantrys ever since Lewis invented him, which suggests he got the type exactly right.

Our rating: 4.2/5 — Lewis’s most prophetically accurate novel — a portrait of American religious hypocrisy that has remained current through every decade since its publication.