Author Sinclair Lewis, whose position as National Champion Castigator is challenged only by his fellow idealist, Critic Henry Louis Mencken, has made another large round-up of grunting, whining, roaring, mewing, driveling, snouting creatures—of fiction— which, like an infuriated swineherd, he can beat, goad, tweak, tail-twist, eye-jab, belly-thwack, spatter with sty-filth and consign to perdition. The new collection closely resembles the herd obtained on the Castigator's last foray, against the medical profession (Arrowsmith, 1925) and a parallel course is run, from up-creek tabernacles, through a hayseed college and seminary to a big-city edifice with a revolving electric cross. But the Arrowsmith plot is altered. This time the Castigator, instead of exerting his greatest efforts in harrying a fine-mettled creature to refuge in the wilderness, singles out the biggest boar in sight and hounds him into a gratifyingly slimy slough. The tale has an obscure hero, another Lewisian lie-hunter who, to purge the last bitter dregs of pity and fear, gets his gentle eyes and mouth whipped to a black pulp by the K. K. K. before he is released. But the boar is the chief sacrifice and its name has the inimitable Lewis smack, Elmer Gantry.*
The Story. Elmer Gantry of Paris, Kan., was born to be a talented garbage contractor or meat salesman. But his pious mother and the Baptist Church have given him everything except any longing for decency and kindness and reason." So they, and his well-developed thirst, lust and cowardice, drive him into the ministry. The first page finds him drunk in a saloon near his alma mater, Terwillinger College. Needing a fight, he lurches into a soap-box crowd that a pimpled Y. M. C. A. pipsqueak is converting, and flattens the hecklers. The Baptists gasp. "HellCat" Gantry, the black-maned campus bully with his boasted amours and loud contempt, get religion? The pipsqueak fawns and prays. A bully bigger than Gantry, "Old Jud" Roberts, praying (and weeping) fullback from Chicago, holds a chest-pound-ing, fistshaking, handshaking, "manly challenge" revival. "HellCat" confesses publicly. The half-baked atheism of "Hell-Cat's" only friend and roommate, Jim Lefferts, is no match for raw afflatus. Unwittingly the atheist supplies all that the convert needs for his "Call" and ordination. The Holy Spirit enters Elmer Gantry, in a timely jolt of Bourbon.
A too-strenuous visitation of the same spirit causes Elmer's ejection, three years later, from Mizpah Theological Seminary. But he has known the intoxication, stronger than drink, of speaking from a pulpit; has learned, among other rewards of the profession, the ease with which a pastor, who is a baritone solo incarnate, can seduce the parish kittens. A few years of selling farm implements and indulging in small town waitresses are an ideal prolongation of Elmer Gantry's novitiate for his first great phase, evangelism.