Elmer Gantry is a loosely episodic chronicle, he continues, “which suggests at once that there will be no sustained pressure of plot, no primary conflict about which all the action is organized and in which value will achieve a complex definition.” At each of the three climaxes in the book, Lewis retreates into melodrama. He was eloquently drunk, lovingly and pugnaciously drunk." Bains initially forces Elmer to agree to marry Lulu, but later, after Elmer shows him Lulu kissing Floyd Naylor, he orders Lulu to marry Floyd. To increase his vocabulary he begins a word list: incinerate, Merovingian, Golgotha, Leigh Hunt, defeasance, chanson—romantic-sounding words. American Film Institute But unlike Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry’s rise is depicted negatively. The bill had always been defeated, but it was gaining more votes in every session … [407–408]. SYNOPSIS Bains promises Elmer that he will make Lulu marry Floyd. In creating the evangelist Sharon Falconer, the author presents himself with a bigger, although more complex, target. ELMER GANTRY WAS the slimy lead character in Sinclair Lewis’s novel by that name. Sharon Falconer is an equally striking example of his satiric power. The media coverage misses the many evangelists and preachers who continue to Serve God with utter integrity and humility. But in Elmer Gantry, he set his sights higher. Source: David J. Dooley, “Aspiration and Enslavement,” in The Art of Sinclair Lewis, University of Nebraska Press, 1967, pp. In the following essay excerpt, Dooley calls Elmer Gantry a picaresque novel that “begins as a satire of revivalism.”. Sharon Falconer is a charismatic evangelist who travels around the country holding spectacular revival meetings. He soon discovers he has a gift for preaching, and he loves the feeling of power he gets when his sermons move his congregation. Lewis’s ingenuity was not exhausted on Elmer. Billy Sunday (1862–1935) was a professional baseball player who quit baseball a few years after he had a religious conversion. 99–107. She wore expensive clothes and jewelry and put on a spectacular show. One such incident (chapter 2, section 3) is when the pious but not very bright Eddie Fislinger is outwitted by Jim Lefferts’s atheist father for the amusement of Jim and Elmer. Elmer meets up again with Lulu, now married to Floyd Naylor, and they resume their flirtation. But they could be healed constantly, and of the same disease.”. At a revival meeting he does not like to include all the preachers in town. DIED: 1963, Oxford, England In the following essay excerpt, Light examines quixotic elements in Elmer Gantry. Therefore, that information is unavailable for most Encyclopedia.com content. It may be that the essential lesson which Lewis’s experience of America taught him was that the barriers to education, self-discovery, and fulfillment were formidably guarded by exploiters and cranks: thus his anger; thus his satire. The sociological factor that works against Elmer is the entire small-town Protestant environment in which he was raised. Elmer forces him to resign by questioning his religious beliefs, after which Shallard gets a job with the Charity Organization Society. Therefore, it’s best to use Encyclopedia.com citations as a starting point before checking the style against your school or publication’s requirements and the most-recent information available at these sites: http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html. But plenty of scandals have ruined real preachers. I am really and truly sanctified! We are all bored by tired old men explaining the Bible through their noses! In a notable passage Lewis tells us sympathetically of the problems of the rebel, of the preacher or the writer who suffers from sensitivity and innocence: He was supposed to cure an affliction called vice. Like Sharon, she drew huge crowds and practiced faith healing. Elmer starts his career as a Baptist and then joins up with a charismatic but equally unprincipled female revivalist preacher. It was both a popular and critical success, selling 295,000 copies in the first year. Elmer Gantry, like all of Lewis’s big novels, is part of one program. Eddie spreads the word that Elmer, who has never shown any zeal for religion, has been converted. “Did he come to bring peace or more war? Nellie Benton is Jim Leffert’s girlfriend when he is a student. The impact of religion on Elmer Gantry symbolizes what it has done to the American spirit. ———, Sinclair Lewis: An American Life, McGraw Hill, 1961, pp. He behaves cruelly to Lulu, and when Floyd comforts her with a kiss, Elmer, who has planned the whole incident, bursts in on them with Lulu’s father. He also raised large amounts of money at his meetings, and like Elmer Gantry, he was one of he first evangelists to spread his message through the new technology of radio. Of the other characters, Frank Shallard and Dr. Philip McGarry are examples of the liberal tendency in the church. The Allegory of Lov…, Lewis, Sinclair She is forced by her father to marry Lloyd Naylor. Some day he would be a bishop, yes, but even that was nothing compared with the fact that he had won a victory over his lower nature.” He kneels in prayer, but in that instant he sees Cleo and at once thinks of seducing her. Sharon soon fires her assistant, Cecil Alyston, and appoints Elmer as his replacement. Frank Shallard has doubts while he is still at the Seminary. There is a good priest whose career runs counter to that of the bad priest Gantry, but he ceases to be a priest. He says both. The clash between fundamentalists and liberals comes to a dramatic and violent climax in the final incident involving Shallard. But while Elmer’s career ascends, that of the honest Frank Shallard, who goes to the seminary with Elmer, descends to the point where Frank is beaten up by members of the Ku Klux Klan for preaching what he believes to be the truth. He denounces other churches for their laxity in condemning sin. One famous evangelist was Gipsy Smith (1860–1947), an Englishman who made twenty-six trips to the United States. Here, they are the sinister forces of righteousness. Another televangelist’s condemnations of the first one crashed down around him when he was forced to confess his own ad­diction to pornography. Speaking at the author's funeral in 1951, the young writer Frederick Manfred delivered a eulogy that captured Lewis' vision of how life should be, and helped to explain his motives for creating a thoroughly flawed character like Elmer Gantry. I know it’s true—it’s in the Bible. Horace Carp is a student at Mizpah Theological Seminary. The Reverend McGarry tells Frank simply to accept the church with all its imperfections—with its Gantrys—and turn to giving hope and comfort to the piteous human beings who come to the church for help. He starts to teach Prosperity classes on his own but cannot make a living from them. Grebstein, Sheldon Norman, Sinclair Lewis, Twayne United States Authors Series, No. In Elmer Gantry Lewis suggested that what is wrong with the small town, what is wrong with business practices, and even what is wrong with the intellectual attitudes that make it difficult for the scientist to go about his research honestly are all due to the hold Protestantism has on American consciousness. Traveling in the Southwest, he is beaten and blinded. Quarles has no time for “… vain arguments that lead nowhere!” Quarles is hostile to the kind of free intellectual inquiry that the liberals advocate, and he relies instead on prayer and faith. Gantry gets religion at a tent meeting in a small town, where he falls for Sister Sharon Falconer. Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list. Elmer is the great man steadily making his way upward in the world—the man of immoderate personal ambition—and the great man hasn’t time for scruples. Refer to each style’s convention regarding the best way to format page numbers and retrieval dates. He is also too bad to be true. He had been a solitary in college, generous but fastidious, jarred by his classmates’ belching and sudden laughter.” Like Carol Kennicott, he suffers a betrayal by books, for his reasoning had been turned from an examination of men as mammals to the mystic theories of souls and their salvation. It was this hypocrisy that drove Lewis in his writing career. On the train he meets a traveling salesman who invites him for a drink, which results in Elmer failing to keep his appointment at the church. And when his hero joins the Methodist Church, Lewis takes full advantage of the opportunity to satirize another sect. Lewis divorced his wife in 1928, and married Dorothy Thompson. It also underscores what Lewis saw as one of the greatest dangers in American society—the tendency toward excess not only in religion but also in production, consumption, patriotism, and the proliferation of institutions… .

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