Elmer Gantry is a greedy, shallow, and philandering Baptist minister who discovers that he has a gift for evangelist preaching. As the silver-tongued preacher rises to ever greater power within the church, eventually heading a large Methodist congregation, he continues to live a life of hypocrisy and self-indulgence. Although often exposed as a fraud, Gantry is never fully discredited. A landmark in American literature, Elmer Gantry is also a penetrating study of religious hypocrisy and the culture of evangelism is it existed in America in the 1920s.
Lewis's classic story of a corrupt and cynical evangelical preacher would seem torn from the pages of current newspapers if the dialogue weren't surprisingly dated. Elmer Gantry is charismatic without being likable, which makes voicing him a tricky business for Anthony Heald. His Elmer is an ambitious, self-righteous sociopath, whose timbre betrays no trace of conscience, self-doubt, regret, or sympathy for others, even at the beginning of his career. Heald's pacing, his accents, his narrative drive are all excellent, although his women tend to sound the same, mostly breathy, credulous ninnies. It may be that that's all there was on the page, but with no character growth in sight, the dispiriting effect is of one jarring note overwhelming the music from beginning to end. B.G. 2009 Audies Finalist (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine
Barnes and Noble Review...
“Elmer Gantry…is timeless; one can hardly turn on a television or radio today without seeing a grisly array of Gantrys plying their trade….What always made Lewis's novels richer than mere satire was the affection he so clearly felt even for the people and institutions he was most eager to expose. As awful as Gantry is, we can't suppress a sneaking liking for him, and neither can his author.”
About the Author
HARRY SINCLAIR LEWIS (1885-1951), the son of a country doctor, was born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota. He attended Yale University, where he was editor of the literary magazine, and graduated in 1907. After a few of his stories had appeared in magazines and his first novel, Our Mr. Wrenn (1914), had been published, he was able to write full time. He was awarded the 1926 Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith (1925) but refused to accept this honor. However, in 1930 he accepted the Nobel Prize for literature, the first American to win that honor.
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