In 1927, Sinclair Lewis published Elmer Gantry, a scathing satire that follows its titular antihero's rise from a drunken, womanizing college football star to a powerful and corrupt evangelist. Gantry drifts from job to job and church to church, charming congregations and exploiting the fervor of the revival movement while indulging every vice he publicly condemns. Lewis drew on his own observations of American religious life, including stints attending revival meetings and consulting with clergy, to paint an unflinching portrait of hypocrisy within organized religion.
The novel caused an immediate uproar upon publication: it was banned in several cities, denounced from pulpits across the country, and Lewis himself received death threats. Despite-or because of-the controversy, Elmer Gantry became the bestselling American novel of 1927 and remains one of Lewis's most enduring works, a sharp-edged companion to his earlier satires of American small-town and business life in Main Street and Babbitt.
Follow one of literature's most memorable con men as he talks, charms, and bullies his way to the top of American religious life, in a novel whose bite has lost none of its edge a century later.
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