Sinclair Lewis's Elmer Gantry

About Elmer Gantry

Sinclair Lewis's Elmer Gantry (1927) is his most scandalous novel — the fraudulent Baptist evangelist Elmer Gantry rising through American religious institutions through charm, hypocrisy, and the exploitation of women. Lewis was burned in effigy in some Southern states; Virginia legislators proposed barring him from the state. The Burt Lancaster film adaptation won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1960. Elmer Gantry remains the definitive literary portrait of the American fraudulent revivalist and is widely regarded as the sharpest of Lewis's portraits of American institutional hypocrisy.