Elmer Gantry

Elmer Gantry is a greedy, shallow, and philandering Baptist minister who discovers that he has a gift for evangelist preaching. As the silver-tongued preacher rises to ever greater power within the church, eventually heading a large Methodist congregation, he continues to live a life of hypocrisy and self-indulgence. Although often exposed as a fraud, Gantry is never fully discredited. A landmark in American literature, Elmer Gantry is also a penetrating study of religious hypocrisy and the culture of evangelism is it existed in America in the 1920s.