Elmer Gantry

Sinclair Lewis

Jan 1927 · New York : Harcourt, Brace

About this ebook

"Here a preacher really breathes in fiction. It is the story of the Reverend Dr. Elmer Gantry from his conversion during wild wild college days, through theological seminary--where the students talk like human beings, not like pious dummies--his curious adventures with a woman evangelists, and his first country pastorate, to the day when he stands out as a Big City Pastor ... There is a whole gallery of portraits: Catholic priests, Christian Science healers, liberal rabbis, Baptist home-missionaries, a Methodist bishop, a village atheist, a high-church Episcopalian, a hundred others, from Gritzmacher Springs, Kansas to New York City."--Dust jacket flap.

About the author

Harry Sinclair Lewis was born on February 7, 1885 in Minnesota. He was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. In 1930, he became the first writer from the United States to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. A lonely child, Lewis immersed himself in reading and diary writing. While studying at Yale University and living in writer Upton Sinclair's communal house, he wrote for Yale Literary Magazine and helped to build the Panama Canal. After graduating from Yale in 1908, Lewis began writing fiction, publishing 22 novels by the end of his career. His early works, while often praised by literary critics, did not reach popularity but with Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927), and Dodsworth (1929), Sinclair Lewis achieved fame as a writer. His style of choice was satire; he explored American small-town life, conformity, hypocrisy, and materialism. Sinclair Lewis was married and divorced twice. As his career wound down, he spent his later life in Europe and died in Rome on January 10, 1951.