| Product Summary | | Format: Multimedia Software | | ISBN: 9781433222177 | | Publisher: Blackstone Audiobooks | | Publish Date: 1/28/2008 | | Buy.com Sku: 206860484 | | Item#: | | Dimensions (in Inches) 7.5H x 5.25L x 0.5T |
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| | | This audiobook is the 2009 winner of the prestigious Audie Award for Best Literary Fiction.
Annotation:
Elmer Gantry, the hero of Sinclair Lewis's satire of fundamentalist religion, is not unlike today's corrupt and greedy TV evangelists. A charlatan and womanizer, Gantry begins as a Baptist, and rises to become the head of a Methodist church. Lewis's novel, which scandalized the churchgoing public when it was published in 1927, reveals the hypocrisy he found in organized religion.
| PraiseNew York World (1866-1931)
"...the most astounding assortment of mumbling evangelists, cheering congregations, silver-tongued exhorters, half-baked divines ever put in the pages of a book....This is the most daring and sensational book that Sinclair Lewis has ever written....This book has held my interest from first to last and has drawn on all my feelings, from sympathy and amusement to revulsion and disgust. It interests me as a document and a revelation of the reporting ability of Sinclair Lewis." - Harry Hansen 03/16/1927New Yorker
"[I]n lively fashion [ELMER GANTRY] told the considerable amount that Lewis knew about American religion." - John Updike 05/17/1993 |
| Author Bio| Sinclair Lewis | | Lewis, the son of a doctor, was born in the small Minnesota town he later reinvented in his novel MAIN STREET. He tried to enlist in the Spanish-American War when he was 13, but was brought back home by his distraught parents. He attended the local public schools, after which he went to Yale, where he never really felt accepted. He left in 1906 without a degree to work at Helicon Hall, Upton Sinclair's Utopian community, followed by an impulsive interlude when he traveled to Panama hoping (in vain) to help build the canal. He returned to Yale, however, and finally graduated in 1908. He then spent several years working at odd jobs and writing for newspapers as he traveled the U.S. He also began to write fiction, most of it negligible. In the 1920s he began to produce the handful of novels that would ensure his place in literary history, beginning with MAIN STREET (1920), which was enormously successful, selling hundreds of thousands of copies; it was followed by BABBITT (1922), ARROWSMITH (1925), ELMER GANTRY (1927), and DODSWORTH (1929), most of them satirical critiques of American middle-class complacency. All these novels were popular best-sellers, and contributed to America's postwar de-sentimentalized view of itself. After he became a literary lion, Lewis taught at Midwestern universities. He was married and divorced twice; his second wife was the well-known newspaperwoman Dorothy Thompson. When he became ill, in his mid-60s, he moved to Italy, where he died at 65 of heart disease. Lewis was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1930 "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humour, new types of characters." Lewis famously described himself as "a dull fellow whose virtue--if there is any--is to be found in his books." |
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