Elmer Gantry Written by Sinclair Lewis in 1926 and published in 1927, Elmer Gantry is a satirical novel that presents a disparaging view of fundamentalist and evangelistic religious activity in the United States and the public attitudes of the 1920s. The novel tells the story of Elmer Gantry, a young, narcissistic, womanizing college athlete who abandons his plan to become a lawyer and instead, after college, attends a Baptist seminary and is ordained as a minister. Able to hide certain sexual indiscretions, he is ultimately expelled before completing his bachelor of divinity degree for missing a scheduled preaching engagement while drunk. After a stint as a traveling salesman he becomes involved with Sharon Falconer, a popular traveling evangelist working from town to town across the midwest. After a fire in her new boardwalk tabernacle, Gantry drifts for a while, and finally becomes a Methodist minister, eventually manipulating and glad-handing his way to becoming a major moral and political force in the Church despite his hypocrisy, dubious motivation, and serial sexual indiscretions. Sinclair Lewis Harry Sinclair Lewis (1885 – 1951) was an American writer primarily known as a novelist. His first major novel, Main Street (1920), was a phenomenal success, ultimately selling an estimated two million copies and earning Lewis over three million dollars within the first few years of its release. A sardonic look at small-town life, Main Street was followed by five more very successful novels: Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927), Dodsworth (1929), and It Can't Happen Here (1935). In 1930, he became the first author from the United States to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded for "his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters."