Elmer Gantry

by Sinclair Lewis

Overview

Today universally recognized as a landmark in American literature, Elmer Gantry scandalized readers when it was first published, causing Sinclair Lewis to be "invited" to a jail cell in New Hampshire and to his own lynching in Virginia. His portrait of a golden-tongued evangelist who rises to power within his church - a saver of souls who lives a life of hypocrisy, sensuality, and ruthless self-indulgence - is also the record of a period, a reign of grotesque vulgarity, which but for Lewis would have left no record of itself. Elmber Gantry has been called the greatest, most vital, and most penetrating study of hyposcriy that has been written since Voltaire.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9788726973914
Publisher:	Saga Egmont French
Publication date:	11/08/2021
Sold by:	De Marque
Format:	eBook
Pages:	593
File size:	754 KB
Language:	French

About the Author

Sinclair Lewis was born in 1885 in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, and graduated from Yale University in 1908. His college career was interrupted by various part-time occupations, including a period working at the Helicon Home Colony, Upton Sinclair’s socialist experiment in New Jersey. He worked for some years as a free lance editor and journalist, during which time he published several minor novels. But with the publication of Main Street (1920), which sold half a million copies, he achieved wide recognition. This was followed by the two novels considered by many to be his finest, Babbitt (1922) and Arrowsmith (1925), which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1926, but declined by Lewis. In 1930, following Elmer Gantry (1927) and Dodsworth (1929), Sinclair Lewis became the first American author to be awarded the Nobel Prize for distinction in world literature. This was the apogee of his literary career, and in the period from Ann Vickers (1933) to the posthumously published World So Wide (1951) Lewis wrote ten novels that reveal the progressive decline of his creative powers. From Main Street to Stockholm, a collection of his letters, was published in 1952, and The Man from Main Street, a collection of essays, in 1953. During his last years Sinclair Lewis wandered extensively in Europe, and after his death in Rome in 1951 his ashes were returned to his birthplace.

Table of Contents

Note de Jean-Pierre Sicre

ELMER GANTRY. LE CHARLATAN

L'Impresario de dieu.Postace par Francis Lacassin

Editorial Reviews

Lewis fut un auteur prophetique autant qu'un chroniqueur exact de son temps. L'organisation des Protestants evangelistesqu'il avait predit prit reellement forme par la suite.(...) Elmer Gantry a ete interdit a Boston au moment de sa publication, etsans aucun doute de multiples ecoles et bibliotheques sont encore en train d'essayer de le bannir de leurs rayons. Autant qu'unproduit de son propre moment historique, ce livre s'avere de notre temps egalement, et probablement de tous les temps.

From the Publisher

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 Winner © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

MARCH 2009 - AudioFile