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.

Death Threats and the Culture War

The ferocity of the reaction to Elmer Gantry — the death threats, the bans, the offers of physical violence from prominent ministers — was itself a form of confirmation. Lewis had identified a structure of American religious power that depended on its immunity from criticism, and the violence of the response demonstrated that the identification was accurate. The Reverend Billy Sunday’s offer to thrash Lewis personally, the Kansas City reverend’s campaign for Lewis’s imprisonment: these were the responses of people who recognized the portrait and could not afford to acknowledge it.

The novel was published in 1927, in the aftermath of the Scopes Trial of 1925, in a country where the conflict between religious fundamentalism and secular modernity was a live political and cultural battleground. Lewis, who had grown up in the Midwest and had observed the revival circuit from a young age, was writing from direct observation rather than outsider hostility, and the specificity of his knowledge — the music, the crowd psychology, the financial arrangements, the political connections — gave the novel a documentary quality that abstract hostility could not have produced.

The American Religious Type

What Lewis identified in Gantry, and what has made the portrait prophetically accurate across nearly a century, is a specifically American archetype that the culture kept producing after Lewis named it: the revivalist preacher who is neither a pure fraud nor a genuine believer but something more complex and more dangerous than either. The pure fraud knows he is performing and performs accordingly; the pure believer believes and is therefore limited by his beliefs. Gantry is the man who performs so well that he sometimes believes his own performance, and this intermittent sincerity is what makes him effective. He is not lying when he says he feels the Spirit; he is experiencing a real emotional state that his training and temperament have learned to produce on demand. That this state is also profitable does not, in Gantry’s view, diminish its authenticity.

Lewis understood that this type — the salesman who has sold himself his own pitch — was not limited to religion. It was the defining American entrepreneurial type, applied in Gantry’s case to the product of salvation rather than real estate or pharmaceuticals. The skills required are the same: the ability to read an audience, to construct an emotional experience, to make the sale feel like a gift rather than a transaction.

Sharon Falconer’s Significance

Sharon Falconer is Lewis’s most fully realized female character precisely because she exceeds the satirical frame that contains Gantry. She is not simply a hypocrite or a fraud; she has constructed, out of the same materials that made Gantry a performer, a genuinely alternative identity — the divinely appointed prophetess — and she inhabits it with a conviction that Gantry, for all his gifts, cannot quite match. Her death in the fire at her temple is the novel’s most ambiguous moment: the collapse of a structure she built and believed in, with her inside it.

The film adaptation of 1960, with Burt Lancaster in the title role, won the Academy Award for Best Actor. Lancaster’s Gantry is a magnificent performance, but the novel’s Gantry is more interesting: more ordinary, more intermittently self-aware, and more of a genuinely American type.