Elmer Gantry (Signed)
- SIGNED
- New York: Harcourt Brace, 1927
New York: Harcourt Brace, 1927. First edition. Near Fine/Near Fine. Second issue binding (showing the "G" in “Gantry” on the spine). Signed by the author on the front free endpaper. Octavo (7 1/2 x 5 1/2 inches; 189 x 133 mm). [viii], 1-432 pp. Original blue cloth. Front board and spine stamped and lettered in orange. Fore-edge uncut. In publisher's dust jacket. Jacket with slight wear to the spine ends and a little scuff to the spine panel. Jacket with price intact (but stuck through). All corners of jacket publisher-clipped. Small bookseller label on rear paste down. Overall a near fine book in a near fine dust jacket.
Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win a Nobel Prize in Literature, was never afraid to highlight hypocrisy. In the novel Elmer Gantry, he turns his critical pen towards the clergy. Named after the title character, the satire follows Gantry from his days as a young divinity student troubled by his sexual desires to “a hypocritical minister and, later, a jackleg traveling evangelist. Some ministers of the day approved of the book as an attack on genuine abuses within their profession, and literary gadfly H. L. Mencken praised its satire of corrupt fundamentalism. Many critics, however, viewed the book as obscene and its satire as overdone." (American Dictionary of National Biography). It would eventually inspire a significant film adaptation in 1960 with Burt Lancaster and Shirley Jones, who both won Oscars, as did the screenplay by Richard Brooks. Near Fine in Near Fine dust jacket.
Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win a Nobel Prize in Literature, was never afraid to highlight hypocrisy. In the novel Elmer Gantry, he turns his critical pen towards the clergy. Named after the title character, the satire follows Gantry from his days as a young divinity student troubled by his sexual desires to “a hypocritical minister and, later, a jackleg traveling evangelist. Some ministers of the day approved of the book as an attack on genuine abuses within their profession, and literary gadfly H. L. Mencken praised its satire of corrupt fundamentalism. Many critics, however, viewed the book as obscene and its satire as overdone." (American Dictionary of National Biography). It would eventually inspire a significant film adaptation in 1960 with Burt Lancaster and Shirley Jones, who both won Oscars, as did the screenplay by Richard Brooks. Near Fine in Near Fine dust jacket.