Today universally recognized as a landmark in American literature,
Elmer Gantry
scandalized readers when it was first published, causing Sinclair Lewis to be "invited" to a jail cell in New Hampshire and to his own lynching in Virginia. His portrait of a golden-tongued evangelist who rises to power within his church - a saver of souls who lives a life of hypocrisy, sensuality, and ruthless self-indulgence - is also the record of a period, a reign of grotesque vulgarity, which but for Lewis would have left no record of itself.
Elmber Gantry
has been called the greatest, most vital, and most penetrating study of hyposcriy that has been written since Voltaire.