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> 4 a Ny March 26, 1927 WINNETKA TALK 55 Book Review "Elmer Gantry" is a big thing. That proof comes with the reading. Interest is immediate and intense, and pencil flies to paper as thought is stirred and stimulated continually with the tale's unwinding. Only the big book can do that, and to have come through fixed and fascinated hours of such fiction with passages underlined, margins scribbled and papers covered with quick annotations, is to have established evi- dence that something worth the read- ing has been read. What will be the reaction to the latest work of this novelist who alone, of all contemporaries, appears to have the power to stir the American reading public? And what has he done this time? He hac created Elmer Gantry to sym- bolize that which is fraud in the preach- ers and false in the churches. Hold up our horrified hands as we Methodists will, wax indignant as we Episcopalians may, resent as we Baptists will do, or sniff as the mass of us will be certain to sniff, undeniably we must admit that there are actually so many Elmer Gan- trys! Also that Sinclair Lewis has done a good job. Elmers have sold us bogus oil stock and flooded Florida land; Elmers have been haled into the morals courts and into the criminal courts; Elmers have horned into and been horned out of countless trusting and hopeful parish- es, and Elmers have horned into them and remained, flattered and believed. Elmers, of course, are by no means con- fined to the ministry. They pervade all professions and pursuits--smirking, dis- gusting, hypocritical, slick and thoroughly contemptible; but because society wants the church to stand aloft, superior as the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace, and insists that its preachers bear themselves with corre- sponding character, it is more dangerous that Elmers exist there. If Sinclair Lewis' arraying of one of them arouses a realization and disgust where blind indulgence has met them before, then he will have labored more effectively in the vineyard than many a brother hell-bent on making more uncomfortable the un- comfortable African and the heathen in his blindness still more blind. Elmer Gantry, in his college days in Terwilliger college, a Baptist institution of Kansas, began his conflict with the world, the flesh and the devil as a big blubbering bully, handsome, after a fashion, not at all bashful, given to "stepping" after the all-inclusive manner of today. Elmer "gets religion." He per- suades himself that there is an unexact- ing, comfortable living to be made preaching, It appeals to his colossal van- ity to imagine himself orating with silver tongue to gaping throngs, and buzzing around as kingbee in some earnest and reverencing hive. He is ordained into the Baptist minis- try, seduces a simple sister in his first pastorate, and by a rogue's ruse manages to wriggle out of the mess, falls in with Sharon Falconer, a woman evangelist, and serves as her man Friday and a few other interesting things until tragedy ends the lady's life. He flounders perilously awhile until able to horn into the Methodist ministry. From then on his record is one that would take the ordinary criminal uncomfortably close to the gallows. The book is also peopled with the other types who make or mar the minis- terial profession. It leaves little un- sounded and exploited that has to do with the profession. An incomprehensible amount of zeal and faithfulness has gone into this study and the result is a totally unbaised, fair arraigning of Frank 'Shal- lard the honest, doubting preacher, An- drew Pengilly, lovable and tolerant scion of the old school of gospel, and kindly Father Smeesby. That uncanny observ- ance of the last detail that marks the alert pen of Lewis has caught also re- deeming signs among the falsenesses, the hypocrisies. No detail of faith or tradition eludes him, of human emotion, of feminine reaction,--and he knows his Bible now if he never knew it before he began on "Elmer Gantry." And so we have another of the series on "Fundamental Foibles of Folks'-- stimulating, amusing, non-acrimonious and so just that it hurts. "Elmer Gan- try," in our opinion, is a "hig book. ges 11 Ist "0ANs'" 2nd Our Service and Rates Satisfy H. GROSSMAN & SON 1082 First National Bank Bldg. 38 S. 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