Elmer Gantry (1929) (edit title/settings)

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Summary edit see section history

Quotes edit see section history

• “I have here in my pocket - and thank heaven you can't see them - lewd, dirty, obscene, and I'm ashamed to say this: French postcards. They were sold to me in front of your own innocent high school by a man with a black beard... a foreigner.”

  Elemer Gantry

• “I was accosted by three painted women. Your streets are made unsafe by shameless, diseased hussies, rapacious pick-pockets, and insidious opium-smokers.”

  Elmer Gantry

• Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers

• He had, in fact, got everything from the church and Sunday School, except, perhaps, any longing whatever for decency and kindness and reason.

  Highlighted by 25 Kindle customers

• He was born to be a senator. He never said anything important, and he always said it sonorously.

  Highlighted by 17 Kindle customers

• Elmer assumed that he was the center of the universe and that the rest of the system was valuable only as it afforded him help and pleasure.

  Highlighted by 16 Kindle customers

• 'The Roman Catholic Church is superior to the militant Protestant Church. It does not compel you to give up your sense of beauty, your sense of humor, or your pleasant vices. It merely requires you to give up your honesty, your reason, your heart and soul.'

  Highlighted by 15 Kindle customers

• You know it's almost impossible to get people to read the Bible honestly. They've been so brought up to take the church interpretation of every word that they read into it whatever they've been taught to find there.

  Highlighted by 11 Kindle customers

• 'All you have to do,' said Zenz, 'is to get some sound and perfectly meaningless doctrine and keep repeating it. You won't bore the laymen -in fact the only thing they resent is something that is new, so they have to work their brains.

  Highlighted by 11 Kindle customers

• Sinclair Lewis (Lord, how that book of Lewis', 'Main Street,' did bore me, as much of it as I read; it just rambled on forever, and all he could see was that some of the Gopher Prairie hicks didn't go to literary teas quite as often as he does! -that was all he could see among those splendid heroic pioneers)!

  Highlighted by 10 Kindle customers

• The Elmer Gantry who had for years pretended that he relished defying the whole college had for those same years desired popularity. He had it now -popularity, almost love, almost reverence, and he felt overpoweringly his rôle as leading man.

  Highlighted by 9 Kindle customers

• The light was dim, completely soothing, coming through fantastic windows such as are found only in churches, saloons, jewelry shops, and other retreats from reality.

  Highlighted by 8 Kindle customers

• 'Why is that it's only in religion that the things you got to believe are agin all experience?

  Highlighted by 7 Kindle customers

First Sentence edit see section history

Series & Lists edit see section history

Followed by The Plutocrat.

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Sinclair Lewis (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: PS3523.E94 1929
• Dewey: 813.52

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Literature & Fiction › Authors, A-Z › ( L ) › Lewis, Sinclair
• Books › Entertainment › Humor › Satire
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Literary
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Classics
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Classics
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Contemporary

Movie Connections edit see section history

• Elmer Gantry (1960) (IMDb): Staring Burt Lancaster, Jean Simmons, Arthur Kennedy, Dean Jagger, and Shirley Jones