Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis

First published: 1927

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Satire

Time of plot: 1902-1925

Locale: Midwestern United States

Principal characters

• Elmer Gantry, a minister
• Mrs. Gantry, his mother
• Cleo Benham Gantry, his wife
• Lulu Bains, his mistress
• Hettie Dowler, another of his mistresses
• Oscar Dowler, Hettie’s husband
• Judson Roberts, a former football star and state secretary of the YMCA
• Frank Shallard, a minister and Elmer’s chief antagonist
• Sharon Falconer, an evangelist
• Mrs. Evans Riddle, an evangelist and a New Thought leader
• T. J. Riggs, a rich associate of Elmer in Zenith

The Story:

Elmer Gantry, known as Hell-cat to his classmates at Terwillinger College in Kansas in 1902, is a large man, six feet one, with a loud, booming voice. He leads the team as football captain and is twice elected class president. Although he is assumed to be popular, Gantry is not really well liked by his classmates. Elmer’s father, Logan Gantry, a feed dealer, died at a young age, leaving his widow to support herself and her son with her sewing. She was a religious woman and made Gantry go to church, where he learned about religion but failed to learn decency or kindness.

When the evangelist Judson Roberts speaks at the college for the YMCA Week of Prayer, Gantry is moved to kneel in prayer and announce that he is saved. The crowd cheers for the passionate speech Gantry delivers following his conversion, and the president of the college tells him he is a born preacher. Gantry’s mother, who attended the meeting, says it was her happiest moment. College officials and his mother urge Elmer to become a minister.

Gantry attends Mizpah Seminary, where he is ordained as a Baptist minister. While he is preaching in a small town, Gantry meets Lulu Bains, the daughter of a deacon at the church, and seduces her. He promises to marry her but quickly tires of her. When Floyd Naylor and Deacon Bains threaten to beat him if he does not marry Lulu, Gantry claims he always planned to marry her, and they announce the engagement. In a scheme to get out of his commitment, however, he stages a fight with Lulu and then leaves her alone with Floyd. As Floyd innocently embraces Lulu to comfort her, Gantry leads Deacon Bains to the spot and shines a flashlight on the couple. Outraged to see his daughter kissing Floyd, the deacon forces Lulu to marry Floyd. Gantry pretends to be devastated by Lulu’s betrayal and asks the dean for a transfer.

On his way to the new church, Gantry gets drunk with a stranger he meets on the train, passes out, and misses the church service. He is fired from the seminary and has to find work as a salesman for a farm implement company. On his travels, he falls under the spell of a female evangelist named Sharon Falconer. Acting as her assistant, Gantry pays people to fake being saved or feigns his own conversion. Following her rise to eminence as a healer of the sick, Sharon buys a resort on the New Jersey coast that she names Waters of Jordan Tabernacle. By holding meetings there, she does not have to share her profits with local churches. When a workman carelessly discards a cigarette, the tabernacle goes up in flames and kills 111 people, including Sharon and her crew. Gantry tries to lead Sharon to safety, but she stubbornly keeps her station, holding a wooden cross in front of her. Only Gantry survives.

Unable to earn a living as an independent evangelist, Gantry works for Mrs. Evans Riddle, another evangelist, until he is fired for stealing from the collection plate. In 1913, Gantry meets the Methodist church leader Bishop Toomis, who is impressed with Gantry’s style. Gantry becomes a Methodist, and Toomis arranges for Gantry to serve as a minister in the small town of Banjo Crossing. There he courts and marries Cleo Benham because he thinks she will help his career. Gantry never returns the love Cleo feels for him, and after the birth of their second child, they move into separate bedrooms.

At the age of thirty-nine, Gantry is given a large church in Zenith, a city with a population of 400,000. He becomes friends with T. J. Riggs, a famous trial lawyer and a trustee of the church. Gantry is a popular preacher and soon builds up attendance. Preferring to spend time on church work and organizations, Gantry is seldom home and, when he is, he is so surly and critical that his own children are afraid of him.

One Sunday, Lulu and Floyd show up at Gantry’s church. Lulu is still in love with Gantry, and he feels physical attraction for her. Soon Lulu and Gantry are meeting secretly in the church on Tuesday nights.

Gantry meets with other ministers in town on a regular basis, and after he is in Zenith for a year and a half, he organizes a committee on public morals to conduct an attack on the red-light district. He wins attention in the press through a few carefully staged raids on small-time bootleggers and prostitutes.

Gantry’s hellfire and damnation sermons continue to attract attention from the public and the press. Gantry also uses his pulpit to denounce the religious views of his former classmate, Frank Shallard, who preaches in the same town. As a result of Gantry’s smear attack, Shallard is fired from his church. Later, thugs calling him a heretic beat Shallard so brutally that he loses sight in one eye. Gantry calls to offer condolences and says he will find and punish the offenders, but Shallard never hears from Gantry again.

As Gantry’s success continues, he joins the Rotary Club, plays golf with the wealthy men of the community, and spends money on expensive clothes. He convinces the officials of Abernathy College to award him a doctor of divinity degree so that people can call him Dr. Gantry. When his sermons are broadcast on the radio, his audience increases from two thousand to ten thousand. He travels to London, New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto to preach.

Gantry fires his longtime secretary and hires Hettie Dowler, a beautiful young woman who soon becomes his mistress. To get rid of Lulu, Gantry tells her that Cleo found out about the affair and that he has to end their relationship. That leaves Gantry free to concentrate on Hettie. When Hettie and her husband try to blackmail Gantry with the letters that Gantry wrote to her, the press gets hold of the news and denounces Gantry. A detective, hired by Gantry’s friend Riggs, investigates Hettie and discovers enough information on her past activities to force her to sign a confession that exonerates Gantry. The newspapers announce Gantry’s innocence, and the congregation cheers him on Sunday. Gantry vows to avoid temptation in the future, but even as he kneels in prayer with his congregation, he notices a pretty woman in the choir whom he wants to meet.

Bibliography

Dooley, D. J. “Aspiration and Enslavement.” In The Art of Sinclair Lewis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967. Examines Elmer’s picaresque journey through American religion in the early twentieth century. Charges that the novel fails as satire because it is neither realistic nor witty.

Geismar, Maxwell. “Sinclair Lewis: The Cosmic Bourjoyce.” In The Last of the Provincials: The American Novel, 1915-1925. New York: Hill and Wang, 1949. Suggests that Lewis has little insight into religious motivation or the commercial exploitation of religion. Criticizes the character of Sharon Falconer as neoprimitive and that of Gantry as an archetypal opportunist and false prophet.

Grebstein, Sheldon Norman. “The Great Decade.” In Sinclair Lewis. New York: Twayne, 1962. Explores the novel’s background and describes its having been written in “the most hotly charged religious atmosphere in America since the Salem witch burnings.”

Hilfer, Anthony Channell. “Elmer Gantry and That Old Time Religion.” In The Revolt from the Village, 1915-1930. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969. Perceives Elmer Gantry as an attack on small-town provincialism. Discusses contemporary social events and issues, such as the Scopes trial, Prohibition, and the hypocrisy and corruption of some religious extremists.

Hutchisson, James M. The Rise of Sinclair Lewis, 1920-1930. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. Focuses on Lewis’s career in the 1920’s, when he wrote Elmer Gantry and the other novels that earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature. Hutchisson examines the techniques Lewis used to create his novels, focusing on Elmer Gantry in chapter 4.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, ed. Sinclair Lewis: New Essays in Criticism. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1997. Includes George Killough’s essay “Elmer Gantry, Chaucer’s Pardoner, and the Limits of Serious Words,” as well as essays on many of Lewis’s other novels and an annotated bibliography of Lewis studies from 1977 through 1997.

Lingeman, Richard R. Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street. New York: Random House, 2002. A critical biography that includes analysis of Lewis’s novels. Lingeman provides a detailed description of Lewis’s unhappy life.

Schorer, Mark, ed. Sinclair Lewis: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962. Contains earlier criticism of Elmer Gantry, including Rebecca West’s famous attack on the novel as ineffective satire and Joseph Wood Krutch’s praise of the book, as well as Schorer’s classic study, “Sinclair Lewis and the Method of Half-Truths.”