Elmer Gantry (novel)

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Elmer Gantry is a socially critical development novel by Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis from 1927.

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The satirical novel describes the rise of Elmer Gantry to the top of the religious management of the Protestant denominations in the USA. The requisites for success are rhetorical talent and hypocrisy paired with sentimentality and peasant cunning.

Elmer Gantry is the enfant terrible of his school. When, out of a riot, he stands in front of comrades on mission from his college who are harassed while doing their work in the city, and he is celebrated as a convert. Elmer is increasingly enjoying himself in this role, but his religiosity has no moral implications. Entrusted with an honorable representation, he is caught debilitating and has to give up his career in the Baptist Church . He soon found a connection with the revival movement and proved himself to be a preacher, organizer and lover of the evangelist Sharon Falconer (real role models are probably the traveling preachers Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple McPherson ). When she dies in a fire in her newly built sermon hall, he also has to give up this job. Through a complacent Methodist priest, he found a connection to a church career, which, albeit accompanied by sexual escapades, led steeply upwards. His opponent is the idealistic Frank Shallard, who at the beginning is a small-minded man who believes in authority and the Bible, but in the course of the novel develops into a thinking church critic who is crippled by pseudo-Christian criminals when he campaigns against ecclesiastical reservations about the free Science leads.

Gantry's striving for success becomes more ambitious, he is a priest in ever larger cities, eventually even in New York . In the end, he almost fails because of a secretary who uses a mock affair with Gantry to extort money from him. Influential friends help him out of this situation, however, and Gantry can pursue his goal of establishing an internationally functioning institution for moral preservation with him as chairman.

background

With this novel, Lewis wrote a work that attacked the foundations of the revival movement. The book so outraged readers that Lewis was imprisoned or even lynched . Lewis' bitterness must be seen against the backdrop of the Scopes Trial in Tennessee .

In 1930, three years after the novel was published, Lewis was awarded the Nobel Prize.

In 1960 the book was made into a film with Burt Lancaster and Jean Simmons (see Elmer Gantry (film) ) .

swell

  • Lexicon of World Literature , Alfred Kröner Verlag, Stuttgart, 1968
  • Elmer Gantry , Rowohlt Verlag, Hamburg, 1954