To H. L. Mencken with profound admiration...

No character in this book is the portrait of any actual person. S. L....

Elmer Gantry was drunk. He was eloquently drunk, lovingly and pugnaciously drunk. He leaned against the bar of the Old Home Sample Room, the most gilded and urbane saloon in Cato, Missouri, and reques...

Elmer Gantry was drunk. He was eloquently drunk, lovingly and pugnaciously drunk. He leaned against the bar of the Old Home Sample Room, the most gilded and urbane saloon in Cato, Missouri, and reques...

Elmer Gantry, best known to classmates as Hellcat, had, this autumn of 1902, been football captain and led the best team Terwillinger College had known in ten years. They had won the championship of t...

Terwillinger College, founded and preserved by the more zealous Baptists, is on the outskirts of Gritzmacher Springs, Kansas. (The springs have dried up and the Gritzmachers have gone to Los Angeles, ...

Chief adornment of their room was the escritoire of the first Gritzmacher, which held their library. Elmer owned two volumes of Conan Doyle, one of E. P. Roe, and a priceless copy of Only a Boy. Jim h...

That November day of 1902, November of their Senior year, was greasy of sky, and slush blotted the wooden sidewalks of Gritzmacher Springs. There was nothing to do in town, and their room was dizzying...

They were gone, Elmer and Jim, before the return of Nellie’s aunt. As they were not entertaining the girls, they dined on pork chops, coffee, and apple pie at the Maginnis Lunch. It has already been n...

For years the state of sin in which dwelt Elmer Gantry and Jim Lefferts had produced fascinated despair in the Christian hearts of Terwillinger College. No revival but had flung its sulphur-soaked arr...

For years the state of sin in which dwelt Elmer Gantry and Jim Lefferts had produced fascinated despair in the Christian hearts of Terwillinger College. No revival but had flung its sulphur-soaked arr...

Even had Elmer not known the church by habit, he would have been led to it by his mother. Aside from his friendship for Jim Lefferts, Elmer’s only authentic affection was for his mother, and she was o...

With alarmed evangelistic zeal, Jim Lefferts struggled to keep Elmer true to the faith, after his exposure to religion in defending Eddie at Cato. He was, on the whole, rather more zealous and fatigui...

Early in January was the Annual College Y.M.C.A. Week of Prayer. It was a countrywide event, but in Terwillinger College it was of especial power that year because they were privileged to have with th...

Early in January was the Annual College Y.M.C.A. Week of Prayer. It was a countrywide event, but in Terwillinger College it was of especial power that year because they were privileged to have with th...

It was undoubtedly Eddie who wrote or telegraphed to Mrs. Gantry that she would do well to be present at the meeting. Paris was only forty miles from Gritzmacher Springs. Elmer crept into his room at ...

The climactic meeting of the Annual Prayer Week, to be addressed by President Quarles, four ministers, and a rich trustee who was in the pearl-button business, with Judson Roberts as star soloist, was...

It was after one. Surely Jim would be asleep, and by next day there might be a miracle. Morning always promises miracles. He eased the door open, holding it with a restraining hand. There was a light ...

When President Quarles called for him, Elmer’s exhortation was outlined, and he had changed to his Sunday-best blue serge double-breasted suit and sleeked his hair. As they departed, Jim called Elmer ...

There was a sizable and extremely curious gathering at the Y.M.C.A. All day the campus had debated, “Did Hellcat really sure-enough get saved? Is he going to cut out his hell-raising?” Every man he kn...

Judson Roberts, ex-football-star, state secretary of the Y.M.C.A., was on the train to Concordia, Kansas. In the vestibule he had three puffs of an illegal cigarette and crushed it out. “No, really, i...

Elmer walked home firmly. “Just what right has Mr. James B. Lefferts got to tell me I mustn’t use my ability to get a crowd going? And I certainly had ’em going! Never knew I could spiel like that. Ea...

President Quarles urged him. Elmer would, perhaps, affect the whole world if he became a minister. What glory for Old Terwillinger and all the shrines of Gritzmacher Springs! Eddie Fislinger urged him...

President Quarles urged him. Elmer would, perhaps, affect the whole world if he became a minister. What glory for Old Terwillinger and all the shrines of Gritzmacher Springs! Eddie Fislinger urged him...

Spring on the prairie, high spring. Lilacs masked the speckled brick and stucco of the college buildings, spiræa made a flashing wall, and from the Kansas fields came soft airs and the whistle of mead...

On their way home, they two alone, the oldest faculty-member said to the dean, “Yes, it was a fine gratifying moment. And⁠—herumph!⁠—slightly surprising. I’d hardly thought that young Gantry would go ...

In the cottonwood grove by the muddy river, three miles west of Paris, Kansas, the godly were gathered with lunch-baskets, linen dusters, and moist unhappy babies for the all-day celebration. Brothers...

In the cottonwood grove by the muddy river, three miles west of Paris, Kansas, the godly were gathered with lunch-baskets, linen dusters, and moist unhappy babies for the all-day celebration. Brothers...

He walked among the Kayooska Valley communicants, beside his mother. She was a small-town business woman; she was not unduly wrinkled or shabby; indeed she wore a good little black hat and a new brown...

They were assembling on benches, wagon-seats and boxes for the ceremony of ordination. The pulpit was a wooden table with a huge Bible and a pitcher of lemonade. Behind it were seven rocking chairs fo...

The state of Winnemac lies between Pittsburgh and Chicago, and in Winnemac, perhaps a hundred miles south of the city of Zenith, is Babylon, a town which suggests New England more than the Middle West...

The state of Winnemac lies between Pittsburgh and Chicago, and in Winnemac, perhaps a hundred miles south of the city of Zenith, is Babylon, a town which suggests New England more than the Middle West...

The Reverend Jacob Trosper, D.D., Ph. D., LL.D., dean and chief executive of Mizpah Theological Seminary, and Professor of Practical Theology and Homiletics, was a hard-faced active man with a large a...

The Reverend Jacob Trosper, D.D., Ph. D., LL.D., dean and chief executive of Mizpah Theological Seminary, and Professor of Practical Theology and Homiletics, was a hard-faced active man with a large a...

In the virginal days of 1905 section gangs went out to work on the railway line not by gasoline power but on a handcar, a platform with two horizontal bars worked up and down like pump-handles. On a h...

For two Sundays now Elmer had striven to impress Lulu not only as an efficient young prophet but as a desirable man. There were always too many people about. Only once did he have her alone. They walk...

Elmer and Frank had gone down on Saturday afternoon to decorate the church for the Thanksgiving service. To save the trip to Babylon and back, they were to spend Saturday night in the broad farmhouse ...

Frank Shallard turned on Elmer in their bedroom, while they were washing for supper⁠—their first moment alone since Lulu and Miss Baldwin had driven them to the Bains farm to spend the night before th...

Deacon and Mrs. Bains⁠—an angry-faced, generous, grasping, horsy, black-mustached man he was, and she a dumpling⁠—managed to treat Frank and Elmer simultaneously as professors of the sacred mysteries ...

Lulu was at the other end of the table from Elmer. He was rather relieved. He despised Frank’s weakness, but he was never, as with Eddie Fislinger, sure what Frank would do or say, and he determined t...

After the tremendous leave-taking, to a yawning host Elmer suggested, “If it won’t bother you and Sister Bains, I’m going to stay down here by the fire a few minutes and complete my notes for my sermo...

During their handcar return to Babylon and the Seminary, Elmer and Frank had little to say. “Don’t be such a grouch. Honest, I’m not trying to get funny with little Lulu,” Elmer grumbled, panting as h...

The ardor of Lulu, the pride of having his own church at Schoenheim, the pleasure of watching Frank Shallard puff in agony over the handcar, all these did not make up to Elmer for his boredom in semin...

The ardor of Lulu, the pride of having his own church at Schoenheim, the pleasure of watching Frank Shallard puff in agony over the handcar, all these did not make up to Elmer for his boredom in semin...

Frank Shallard’s father was a Baptist minister, sweet-tempered, bookish, mildy liberal, not unsuccessful; his mother was of a Main Line family, slightly run to seed. He was born in Harrisburg and rear...

By Senior year he had read many of Dr. Zechlin’s bootlegged books: Davenport’s Primitive Traits in Religious Revivals, which asserted that the shoutings and foamings and twitchings at revival meetings...

Frank had always disliked Elmer’s thickness, his glossiness, his smut, and his inability to understand the most elementary abstraction. But Frank was ordinarily no great hater, and when they went off ...

Elmer Gantry was always very witty about Dr. Bruno Zechlin. Sometimes he called him “Old Fuzzy.” Sometimes he said, “That old coot ought to teach Hebrew⁠—he looks like a page of Yid himself.” Elmer co...

The relations of Brother Gantry and Brother Shallard were not ardent, toward Chrismastide, even in the intimacy of pumping a handcar. Frank complained while they were laboring along the track after ch...

The relations of Brother Gantry and Brother Shallard were not ardent, toward Chrismastide, even in the intimacy of pumping a handcar. Frank complained while they were laboring along the track after ch...

A score of times before March, in her own house, in an abandoned log barn, at the church, Elmer contrived to have meetings with Lulu. But he wearied of her trusting babble. Even her admiration, since ...

They were alone in the Schoenheim church after morning meeting. She had whispered to him at the door, “I’ve got something I have to tell you.” He was frightened; he grumbled, “Well, we oughtn’t to be ...

Deacon Bains and his good wife had noticed how pale and absentminded was their normally bouncing daughter. “Guess she’s in love with that new preacher. Well, let’s keep our hands off. Be a nice match ...

The Reverend Elmer Gantry was reading an illustrated pink periodical devoted to prizefighters and chorus girls in his room at Elizabeth J. Schmutz Hall late of an afternoon when two large men walked i...

It was usual for the students of Mizpah to let Dean Trosper know if they should become engaged. The dean recommended them for ministerial appointments, and the status of marriage made a difference. Ba...

He had to work quickly. He had less than two months before the threatened marriage. If he could entangle Lulu with someone? What about Floyd Naylor? The fool loved her. He spent as much time in Schoen...

As he tramped back to Babylon that evening, Elmer did not enjoy his deliverance so much as he had expected. But he worked manfully at recalling Lulu’s repetitious chatter, her humorless ignorance, her...

As he tramped back to Babylon that evening, Elmer did not enjoy his deliverance so much as he had expected. But he worked manfully at recalling Lulu’s repetitious chatter, her humorless ignorance, her...

It was an hilarious Elmer Gantry who took the 10:21 train to Monarch, a city of perhaps three hundred thousand. He sat in the day-coach planning his Easter discourse. Jiminy! His first sermon in a rea...

From the Ishawonga Hotel, at noon, Elmer telephoned to the office of Mr. Eversley, the brightest light of the Flowerdale Baptist Church. There was no answer. “Everybody in his office out to dinner. We...

In that era long-distance telephoning was an uncommon event, but Eversley, deacon and lawyer, was a bustler. When the new preacher had not appeared by six on Saturday afternoon, Eversley telephoned to...

When Elmer telephoned Eversley, Monday morning, to explain his sickness, the deacon snapped, “All right. Got somebody else.” “But, well, say, Dean Trosper thought you and the committee might like to t...

Elmer Gantry was twenty-eight and for two years he had been a traveling salesman for the Pequot Company. Harrows and rakes and corn-planters; red plows and gilt-striped green wagons; catalogues and or...

Elmer Gantry was twenty-eight and for two years he had been a traveling salesman for the Pequot Company. Harrows and rakes and corn-planters; red plows and gilt-striped green wagons; catalogues and or...

He had to do nine days’ work, to visit nine towns, in five days, but he was back in Sautersville on Sunday evening and he was on the eleven-o’clock train for Lincoln⁠—in the new brown suit. His fancy ...

Though he did not sleep well, he was up early and at his toilet; he shaved, he touched up his bluff handsomeness with lilac water and talcum, he did his nails, sitting in athletic underwear, awaiting ...

Cecil Aylston was a good deal of a mystic, a good deal of a ritualist, a bit of a rogue, something of a scholar, frequently a drunkard, more frequently an ascetic, always a gentleman, and always an ad...

When Elmer descended from the train in Lincoln Friday afternoon, he stopped before a red-and-black poster announcing that Elmer Gantry was a power in the machinery world, that he was an eloquent and e...

Elmer’s speech at the evangelistic meeting was a cloudburst. It had structure as well as baritone melody, choice words, fascinating anecdotes, select sentiment, chaste point of view, and resolute piet...

Two more series of meetings Sharon Falconer held that summer, and at each of them the power in the machinery world appeared and chronicled his conversion by the Gideon Bible and the eloquence of Siste...

Two more series of meetings Sharon Falconer held that summer, and at each of them the power in the machinery world appeared and chronicled his conversion by the Gideon Bible and the eloquence of Siste...

In New York he had bought a suit of Irish homespun and a heather cap. He looked bulky but pleasantly pastoral as he gaped romantically from the Pullman window at the fields of Virginia. “Ole Virginny⁠...

While he dressed, that is, while he put on the brown suit and a superior new tie, Elmer worried. This sure intimacy was too perfect. Sharon had spoken vaguely of brothers, of high-nosed aunts and cous...

They sat on the hilltop, looking down on noon in the valley, sleepily talking till he roused with: “Why won’t you marry me?” “No. Not for years, anyway. I’m too old⁠—thirty-two to your⁠—what is it, tw...

Not till December did Sharon Falconer take Elmer on as assistant. When she discharged Cecil Aylston, he said, in a small cold voice, “This is the last time, my dear prophet and peddler, that I shall e...

Not till December did Sharon Falconer take Elmer on as assistant. When she discharged Cecil Aylston, he said, in a small cold voice, “This is the last time, my dear prophet and peddler, that I shall e...

When she attacked the larger towns and asked for the support of the richer churches, Sharon had to create several new methods in the trade of evangelism. The churches were suspicious of women evangeli...

The contract signed, the advance-man remembered his former newspaper labors, and for a few days became touchingly friendly with all the reporters in town. There were late parties at his hotel; there w...

The afternoon and evening sermons⁠—those were the high points of the meetings, when Sharon cried in a loud voice, her arms out to them, “Surely the Lord is in this place and I knew it not,” and “All o...

The gospel crew could never consider their converts as human beings, like waiters or manicurists or brakemen, but they had in them such a professional interest as surgeons take in patients, critics in...

They generally, before the end of the meetings, worked up gratifying feeling. Often young women knelt panting, their eyes blank, their lips wide with ecstasy. Sometimes, when Sharon was particularly f...

All the members of the evangelistic crew planned effects to throw a brighter limelight on Sharon. There was feverish discussions of her costumes. Adelbert had planned the girdled white robe in which s...

Sedate as a long married couple, intimate and secure, were Elmer and Sharon on most days, and always he was devoted. It was Sharon who was incalculable. Sometimes she was a priestess and a looming dis...

Sedate as a long married couple, intimate and secure, were Elmer and Sharon on most days, and always he was devoted. It was Sharon who was incalculable. Sometimes she was a priestess and a looming dis...

Among his various relations to her, Elmer was Sharon’s employee. And he resented the fact that she was making five times more than he of that money for which he had a reverent admiration. When they ha...

Sharon continued to house her troupe in hotels, for independence. But an unfortunate misunderstanding came up. Elmer had stayed late in her room, engaged in a business conference, so late that he acci...

The renting of furnished houses for the Falconer Evangelistic Party was a ripe cause for new quarrels with local committees, particularly after the party had left town. There were protests by the infu...

One of Sharon’s chief troubles was getting her crew to bed. Like most actors, they were high-strung after the show. Some of them were too nervous to sleep till they had read the Saturday Evening Post;...

Though her presence nearly took away his need of other stimulants, of tobacco and alcohol and most of his cursing, it was a year before Elmer was altogether secure from the thought of them. But gradua...

It was not her eloquence but her healing of the sick which raised Sharon to such eminence that she promised to become the most renowned evangelist in America. People were tired of eloquence; and the w...

It was not her eloquence but her healing of the sick which raised Sharon to such eminence that she promised to become the most renowned evangelist in America. People were tired of eloquence; and the w...

They sat on the beach by moonlight, Sharon and Elmer, the night before the opening service. All of Clontar, with its mile of comfortable summer villas and gingerbread hotels, was excited over the tabe...

He tiptoed to Lily’s virgin door and tapped lightly. “Yes?” He dared not speak⁠—Sharon’s door, in the bulky old house they had taken in Clontar, was almost opposite. He tapped again, and when Lily cam...

Not till one in the morning, sitting in flabby dejection, did he have his story shaped and watertight. It was an heroic spectacle, that of the Reverend Elmer Gantry climbing from the second-story balc...

Banners, banners, banners lifting along the rafters, banners on the walls of the tabernacle, banners moving to the air that was sifted in from the restless sea. Night of the opening of Waters of Jorda...

Though to the commonplace and unspeculative eye Mrs. Evans Riddle was but a female blacksmith, yet Mrs. Riddle and her followers knew, in a bland smirking way, that she was instituting an era in which...

Though to the commonplace and unspeculative eye Mrs. Evans Riddle was but a female blacksmith, yet Mrs. Riddle and her followers knew, in a bland smirking way, that she was instituting an era in which...

The Reverend Elmer Gantry had failed as an independent evangelist. He had been quite as noisy and threatening as the average evangelist; to reasonably large gatherings he had stated that the Judgment ...

He felt dazed and homeless and poor, but he started out with Prosperity Classes of his own. He did very well at Prosperity, except that he couldn’t make a living out of it. He spent from a month to fo...

Frank Shallard had graduated from Mizpah Theological Seminary and taken his first pulpit. And now that he was a minister, theoretically different from all ordinary people, he was wondering whether the...

Frank Shallard had graduated from Mizpah Theological Seminary and taken his first pulpit. And now that he was a minister, theoretically different from all ordinary people, he was wondering whether the...

It was a lonely and troubled young man, the Frank Shallard who for his first pastorate came to the Baptist Church at Catawba, a town of eighteen hundred, in the same state with Zenith and the Mizpah S...

If you had cut Andrew Pengilly to the core, you would have found him white clear through. He was a type of clergyman favored in pious fiction, yet he actually did exist. To every congregation he had s...

Bess Needham, later to be Bess Shallard, was remarkably like a robin. She had the same cheerfulness, the same round ruddiness, and the same conviction that early rising, chirping, philoprogenitiveness...

There was, in Eureka, with its steel mills, its briskness, its conflict between hard-fisted manufacturers and hardheaded socialists, nothing of the contemplation of Catawba, where thoughts seemed far-...

The Reverend Elmer Gantry was writing letters⁠—he had no friends, and the letters were all to inquirers about his Prosperity Classes⁠—at a small oak-desk in the lobby of the O’Hearn House in Zenith. H...

The Reverend Elmer Gantry was writing letters⁠—he had no friends, and the letters were all to inquirers about his Prosperity Classes⁠—at a small oak-desk in the lobby of the O’Hearn House in Zenith. H...

The Episcopal Palace. Beyond the somber length of the drawing-room an alcove with groined arches and fan-tracery⁠—remains of the Carthusian chapel. A dolorous crucifixion by a pupil of El Greco, the s...

Into this room Elmer Gantry came with overpowering politeness. He bent, almost as though he were going to kiss it, over the hand of Mrs. Toomis, who was a large lady with eyeglasses and modest spright...

Elmer managed, during supper, to let them know that not only was he a theological seminary man, not only had he mastered psychology, Oriental occultism, and the methods of making millions, but also he...

He couldn’t, Elmer complained, back in the refuge of his hotel, sink to a crossroads of nine hundred people, with a salary of perhaps eleven hundred dollars; not after the big tent and Sharon’s throng...

A Thursday in June 1913. The train wandered through orchard-land and cornfields⁠—two seedy day-coaches and a baggage car. Hurry and efficiency had not yet been discovered on this branch line, and it t...

A Thursday in June 1913. The train wandered through orchard-land and cornfields⁠—two seedy day-coaches and a baggage car. Hurry and efficiency had not yet been discovered on this branch line, and it t...

Banjo Crossing was not extensive, but to find the key to the First Methodist Church was a Scotland Yard melodrama. Brother Fritscher, the shoemaker, had lent it to Sister Anderson of the Ladies’ Aid, ...

Cleo Benham had spent three years in the Sparta Women’s College, specializing in piano, organ, French, English literature, strictly expurgated, and study of the Bible. Returned to Banjo Crossing, she ...

Once he was out of the sacred briskness of his store, Mr. Nathaniel Benham forgot discounts and became an affable host. He said, “Well, well, Brother,” ever so many times, and shook hands profusely. M...

He had two days to prepare his first sermon and unpack his trunk, his bags, and the books which he had purchased in Zenith. His possessions were not very consistent. He had a beautiful new morning coa...

He had two days to prepare his first sermon and unpack his trunk, his bags, and the books which he had purchased in Zenith. His possessions were not very consistent. He had a beautiful new morning coa...

Though Cleo took him for a drive through the country, most of the time before Sunday he dedicated to refurbishing a sermon which he had often and successfully used with Sharon. The text was from Roman...

Sunday School was held after morning service. Elmer determined that he was not going to attend Sunday School every week⁠—“not on your life; sneak in a nap before dinner”⁠—but this morning he was affab...

Evening services at the Banjo Crossing Methodist Church had normally drawn less than forty people, but there were a hundred tonight, when, fumblingly, Elmer broke away from old-fashioned church practi...

He had them! It had been fun to watch the old fanatics, who had objected to the singing of Dixie, come under the spell and admit his power. He had preached straight at one of them after another; he ha...

In his attention to business, Elmer had not given especial heed to the collections. It had not been carelessness, for he knew his technique as a Professional Good Man. But the first day, he felt, he o...

The reception to welcome Elmer was held the next Tuesday evening in the basement of the church. From seven-thirty, when they met, till a quarter of eight, he was busy with a prodigious amount of hands...

He had plans for the Wednesday evening prayer-meeting. He knew what a prayer-meeting in Banjo Crossing would be like. They would drone a couple of hymns and the faithful, half a dozen of them, always ...

His duties at Banjo Crossing were not violent, and hour after hour, in his quiet chamber at the residence of the Widow Clark, he gave himself trustingly to scholarship. He continued his theological st...

Along with his theological and ecclesiastical researches, Elmer applied himself to more worldly literature. He borrowed books from Cleo and from the tiny village library, housed in the public school; ...

Bishop Wesley R. Toomis had suggested to Elmer that he ought to read philosophy, and he had recommended Royce. He himself, he said, hadn’t been able to give so much time to Royce as he would have like...

He did not neglect his not very arduous duties. He went fishing⁠—which gained him credit among the males. He procured a dog, also a sound, manly thing to do, and though he occasionally kicked the dog ...

With women Elmer had always considered himself what he called a “quick worker,” but the properties of the ministry, the delighted suspicion with which the gossips watched a preacher who went courting,...

With women Elmer had always considered himself what he called a “quick worker,” but the properties of the ministry, the delighted suspicion with which the gossips watched a preacher who went courting,...

He called on an evening of late November, and both her parents were out, attending Eastern Star. She looked dreary and red-eyed. He crowed benevolently while they stood at the parlor door, “Why, Siste...

His mother came on from Kansas for the wedding, in January. Her happiness in seeing him in his pulpit, in seeing the beauty and purity of Cleo⁠—and the prosperity of Cleo’s father⁠—was such that she f...

Cleo looked tired, and toward the end of the journey, in the winter evening, with the gale desolate, she seemed scarce to be listening to his observations on graded Sunday School lessons, the treatmen...

The bellboy had scarcely closed the door of their room, with its double bed, when he had seized her, torn off her overcoat, with its snow-wet collar, and hurled it on the floor. He kissed her throat. ...

The discovery that Cleo would never be a lively lover threw him the more into ambition when they had returned to Banjo Crossing. Cleo, though she was unceasingly bewildered by his furies, found someth...

Ishuah Rogers was dead, and they were holding his funeral at the Methodist Church. As farmer, as storekeeper, as postmaster, he had lived all his seventy-nine years in Banjo Crossing. Old J. F. Whittl...

“You were wonderful at the funeral today! I’ve never seen you so sure of immortality,” worshiped Cleo, as they walked home. “Yuh, but they don’t appreciate it⁠—not even when I said about how this old ...

The Annual Conference, held in Sparta, late in March. The high time of the year, when the Methodist preachers of half a dozen districts met together for prayer and rejoicing, to hear of the progress o...

Elmer was examined by the Conference and readily admitted to membership. Among the questions, from the Discipline, which he was able to answer with a hearty “yes” were these: Are you going on to perfe...

They listened to reports on collections for missions, on the creation of new schools and churches; they heard ever so many prayers; they were polite during what were known as “inspirational addresses”...

A year he spent in Rudd Center, three years in Vulcan, and two years in Sparta. As there were 4,100 people in Rudd Center, 47,000 in Vulcan, and 129,000 in Sparta, it may be seen that the Reverend Elm...

A year he spent in Rudd Center, three years in Vulcan, and two years in Sparta. As there were 4,100 people in Rudd Center, 47,000 in Vulcan, and 129,000 in Sparta, it may be seen that the Reverend Elm...

Something like statewide fame began to cling about the Reverend Elmer Gantry during his two years in Sparta⁠—1918 to 1920. In the spring of ’18 he was one of the most courageous defenders of the Midwe...

While he was in Sparta, national prohibition arrived, with its high-colored opportunities for pulpit-orators, and in Sparta he was inspired to his greatest political campaign. The obviously respectabl...

“At first I was afraid,” said the bishop, “you were making a great mistake in soiling yourself in this Sparta campaign. After all, it’s our mission to preach the pure gospel and the saving blood of Je...

He did not stand by the altar now, uplifted in a vow that he would be good and reverent. He was like the new general manager of a factory as he bustled for the first time through the Wellspring Method...

He did not stand by the altar now, uplifted in a vow that he would be good and reverent. He was like the new general manager of a factory as he bustled for the first time through the Wellspring Method...

Though there were nearly four hundred thousand people in Zenith and only nine hundred in Banjo Crossing, Elmer’s reception in the Zenith church-basement was remarkably like his reception in the Banjo ...

On Saturday morning, on the page of religious advertisements in the Zenith newspapers, Elmer’s first sermon was announced in a two-column spread as dealing with the promising problem: “Can Strangers F...

Cleo and he had found a gracious old house in Old Town, to be had cheap because of the ragged neighborhood. He had hinted to her that since he was making such a spiritual sacrifice as to take a lower ...

If in Banjo Crossing Elmer had been bored by inactivity, in Zenith he was almost exhausted by the demands. Wellspring Church had been carrying on a score of institutional affairs, and Elmer doubled th...

Whether or not he was irritable on weekdays, Sundays were to his nervous family a hell of keeping out of his way, and for himself they had the strain of a theatrical first night. He was up at seven, l...

Elmer was as friendly as ever with Bishop Toomis. He had conferred early with the bishop and with the canny lawyer-trustee, T. J. Rigg, as to what fellow-clergymen in Zenith it would be worth his whil...

It was during his inquiry about clerical allies and rivals⁠—they were the same thing⁠—that Elmer learned that two of his classmates at Mizpah Seminary were stationed in Zenith. Wallace Umstead, the Mi...

It was during his inquiry about clerical allies and rivals⁠—they were the same thing⁠—that Elmer learned that two of his classmates at Mizpah Seminary were stationed in Zenith. Wallace Umstead, the Mi...

Not all the tenderness, all the serene uprightness, all the mystic visions of Andrew Pengilly, that village saint, had been able to keep Frank Shallard satisfied with the Baptist ministry after his as...

Elmer had, even in Zenith, to meet plenty of solemn and whiskery persons whose only pleasure aside from not doing agreeable things was keeping others from doing them. But the general bleakness of his ...

Elmer had, even in Zenith, to meet plenty of solemn and whiskery persons whose only pleasure aside from not doing agreeable things was keeping others from doing them. But the general bleakness of his ...

He had not noticed them during that Sunday morning sermon in late autumn, not noticed them among the admirers who came up afterward to shake hands. Then he startled and croaked, so that the current ha...

They had to be careful. Elmer had singularly little relish for having the horny-handed Floyd Naylor come in some afternoon and find him with Lulu. Like many famous lovers in many ages, they found refu...

In the autumn of his first year in Zenith Elmer started his famous Lively Sunday Evenings. Mornings, he announced, he would give them solid religious meat to sustain them through the week, but Sunday ...

In the autumn of his first year in Zenith Elmer started his famous Lively Sunday Evenings. Mornings, he announced, he would give them solid religious meat to sustain them through the week, but Sunday ...

As important as publicity to Elmer was the harassing drive of finance. He had made one discovery superb in its simple genius⁠—the best way to get money was to ask for it, hard enough and often enough....

When he had been in Zenith for a year and three-quarters, Elmer formed the Committee on Public Morals, and conducted his raids on the red-light district. It seemed to him that he was getting less publ...

When from his pulpit the Reverend Elmer Gantry announced that the authorities of Zenith were “deliberately conniving in protected vice,” and that he could give the addresses and ownerships of sixteen ...

At least a thousand people were trying to get near the Central Police Station on the evening when a dozen armed policemen marched down the steps of the station-house and stood at attention, looking up...

There were two amiable young females who, tired of working in a rather nasty bread factory and of being unremuneratively seduced by the large, pale, puffy bakers on Sunday afternoons, had found it eas...

Mr. Oscar Hochlauf had been a saloon-keeper in the days before prohibition, but when prohibition came, he was a saloon-keeper. A very sound, old-fashioned, drowsy, agreeable resort was Oscar’s Place; ...

The attendant crowd and the policemen had whispered that, from the careful way in which he followed instead of leading, it might be judged that the Reverend Lieutenant Gantry was afraid of the siniste...

After two more raids he was delivered at his home by patrol wagon, and left with not entirely sardonic cheers by the policemen. Cleo rushed to meet him, crying, “Oh, you’re safe! Oh, my dear, you’re h...

Elmer, in court, got convictions of sixteen out of the twenty-seven fiends whom he had arrested, with an extra six months for Oscar Hochlauf for resisting arrest and the use of abusive and profane lan...

Elmer, in court, got convictions of sixteen out of the twenty-seven fiends whom he had arrested, with an extra six months for Oscar Hochlauf for resisting arrest and the use of abusive and profane lan...

The Gilfeather Chautauqua Corporation, which conducts week-long Chautauquas in small towns, had not been interested when Elmer had hinted, three years ago, that he had a Message to the Youth of Americ...

Elmer’s metaphysical lecture, entitled “Whoa Up, Youth!” with its counsel about abstinence, chastity, industry, and honesty, its heaven-vaulting poetic passage about Love (the only bow on life’s dark ...

Always a little lonely, lost in the ceaseless unfolding of his mysticism, old Andrew Pengilly had been the lonelier since Frank Shallard had left him. When he heard that the Reverend Elmer Gantry was ...

After the evening Chautauqua Elmer sat in Mr. Pengilly’s hovel, and he was graciously condescending. “You say, Brother Pengilly, that you’ve heard of our work at Wellspring? But do we get so near the ...

His friendship with Dr. Philip McGarry of the Arbor Church was all, Frank Shallard felt, that kept him in the church. As to his round little wife Bess and the three respectable children, he had for th...

His friendship with Dr. Philip McGarry of the Arbor Church was all, Frank Shallard felt, that kept him in the church. As to his round little wife Bess and the three respectable children, he had for th...

However impatient he was with Frank, Philip McGarry’s last wish was to set Elmer Gantry piously baying on Frank’s trail. It was rather an accident. Philip sat next to Elmer at a dinner to discuss miss...

However impatient he was with Frank, Philip McGarry’s last wish was to set Elmer Gantry piously baying on Frank’s trail. It was rather an accident. Philip sat next to Elmer at a dinner to discuss miss...

In less than a month Frank maddened the citizens of Zenith by asserting, in the pulpit, that though he was in favor of temperance, he was not for Prohibition; that the methods of the Anti-Saloon Leagu...

Frank was so simple as to lose his temper when Elmer had bullied him, roared at him, bulked at him, long enough, with Frank’s own deacons accepting Elmer as an authority. He was irritated out of all c...

“What are we going to do, dear?” Bess said wearily. “I’ll stand by you, of course, but let’s be practical. Don’t you think it would make less trouble if you did resign?” “I’ve done nothing for which t...

A meeting of the church body had been called to decide on Frank’s worthiness, and the members had been informed by Styles that Frank was attacking all religion. Instantly a number of the adherents who...

The first church business meeting did not settle the question of Frank’s remaining. He was questioned about his doctrines, and he shocked them by being candid, but the men whom he had helped, the wome...

The second church meeting was postponed. It looked to Elmer as though Frank would be able to stay on at Dorchester Congregational and thus defy Elmer as the spiritual and moral leader of the city. Elm...

When he found that he liked the Charity Organization Society and his work in that bleak institution no better than his work in the church, Frank laughed. “As Bess said! A consistent malcontent! Well, ...

Frank had been with the Charity Organization Society for three years, and he had become assistant general secretary at the time of the Dayton evolution trial. It was at this time that the brisker cons...

Consciousness returned waveringly as dawn crawled over the cornfield and the birds were derisive. Frank’s only clear emotion was a longing to escape from this agony by death. His whole face reeked wit...

The doctors told him that though the right eye was gone completely, he might not entirely lose the sight of the other for perhaps a year. Bess did not shriek when she saw him; she only stood with her ...

Elmer called and raged, “This is the most outrageous thing I’ve ever heard of in my life, Frank! Believe me, I’m going to give the fellows that did this to you the most horrible beating they ever got,...

The Reverend Elmer Gantry was in his oak and Spanish leather study at the great new Wellspring Church. The building was of cheerful brick, trimmed with limestone. It had Gothic windows, a carillon in ...

The Reverend Elmer Gantry was in his oak and Spanish leather study at the great new Wellspring Church. The building was of cheerful brick, trimmed with limestone. It had Gothic windows, a carillon in ...

The chapel of Abernathy College was full. In front were the gowned seniors, looking singularly like a row of armchairs covered with dust-cloths. On the platform, with the president and the senior memb...

It was a great relief at the Rotary Club. They had long felt uncomfortable in calling so weighty a presence “Elmer,” and now, with a pride of their own in his new dignity, they called him “Doc.” The c...

The Rev. Dr. Gantry was the first clergyman in the state of Winnemac, almost the first in the country, to have his services broadcast by radio. He suggested it himself. At that time, the one broadcast...

For years Elmer had had a waking nightmare of seeing Jim Lefferts sitting before him in the audience, scoffing. It would be a dramatic encounter and terrible; he wasn’t sure but that Jim would speak u...

It was in the summer of 1924 that Elmer was granted a three-months leave, and for the first time Cleo and he visited Europe. He had heard the Rev. Dr. G. Prosper Edwards say, “I divide American clergy...

Dr. Elmer Gantry was walking the deck of the Scythia, a bright, confident, manly figure in a blue suit, a yachting cap, and white canvas shoes, swinging his arms and beaming pastorally on his fellow a...

Elmer considered, “Well, I’ve given those poor old birds some cheerfulness to go on with. By golly, there’s nothing more important than to give people some happiness and faith to cheer them along life...

Cleo had not been more obnoxiously colorless than usual, but she had been seasick, and Elmer saw that it had been an error to bring her along. He had not talked to her an hour all the way. There had b...

The page who took their bags up to their room in the Savoy was a brisk and smiling boy with fabulous pink cheeks. “Say, buddy,” said the Rev. Dr. Gantry, “what do you pull down here?” “Sorry, sir, I d...

When he regarded the meager audience at Brompton Road Chapel, Elmer had an inspiration. All the way over he had planned to be poetic in his first London sermon. He was going to say that it was the str...

They almost applauded. They told him afterward that he was immense, and invited him to address them whenever he returned to London. “Wait,” he reflected, “till I get back to Zenith and tell old Potts ...

He stood impatiently on a corner of the Rue de la Paix, while Cleo gaped into the window of a perfumer. (She was too well trained to dream of asking him to buy expensive perfume.) He looked at the faç...

It was on the steamer home that he met and became intimate with J. E. North, the renowned vice-slayer, executive secretary of the National Association for the Purification of Art and the Press⁠—affect...

So Elmer came, though tardily, to the Great Idea which was to revolutionize his life and bring him eternal and splendid fame. That shabby Corsican artillery lieutenant and author, Bonaparte, first con...

“⁠—and I stood,” Elmer was explaining, in the pulpit of Wellspring Church, “there on the Roo deluh Pay in Paris, filled almost to an intolerable historical appreciation of those aged and historical st...

For over a year now it had been murmured through the church-world that no speaker was more useful to the reform organization than the Rev. Dr. Elmer Gantry of Zenith. His own church regretted losing h...

For over a year now it had been murmured through the church-world that no speaker was more useful to the reform organization than the Rev. Dr. Elmer Gantry of Zenith. His own church regretted losing h...

After he had discharged Miss Bundle, the church secretary⁠—and that was a pleasant moment; she cried so ludicrously⁠—Elmer had to depend on a series of incapable girls, good Methodists but rotten sten...

In the cue of people who came up after the morning service to shake hands with the Reverend Dr. Gantry was a young woman whom the pastor noted with interest. She was at the end of the cue, and they ta...

Not even the nights when they worked together, alone in the church, were more thrilling than their swift mocking kisses between the calls of solemn parishioners. To be able to dash across the study an...

That was a hard, a rather miserable job, getting rid of the Lulu Bains whom Hettie had made superfluous. On the Tuesday evening after his first meeting with Hettie, when Lulu came cooing into his stud...

By recommendation of J. E. North, it was Elmer who was chosen by the Sacred Sabbath League to lead the fight against Sunday motion pictures in Zenith. “This will be fine training for you,” Mr. North w...

Within twenty-four hours Mr. J. E. North let Elmer know that he was really resigning in a month, and that the choice for his successor lay between Elmer and only two other holy men; and Dr. Wilkie Ban...

It was too vexatious that at this climax of his life Elmer’s mother should have invited herself to come and stay with them. He was happy when he met her at the station. However pleasant it might be to...

Two evenings after Elmer’s mother had almost alienated him, he settled down in his study at home to prepare three or four sermons, with a hope of being in bed by eleven. He was furious when the Lithua...

Two evenings after Elmer’s mother had almost alienated him, he settled down in his study at home to prepare three or four sermons, with a hope of being in bed by eleven. He was furious when the Lithua...

Elmer was sitting beside Hettie on the damask couch, under the standard lamp, stroking her hand and explaining how unjust his mother was, when the door of her suite opened gravely and a thin, twitchin...

At midnight, his mouth hanging open, Elmer was ringing at the house of T. J. Rigg. He rang and rang, desperately. No answer. He stood outside then and bawled “T. J.! T. J.!” An upper window was opened...

The chastened and positively-for-the-last-time-reformed Elmer lasted for days. He was silent at the conference with Oscar Dowler, Oscar’s lawyer, Mannie Silverhorn, and T. J. Rigg in the church study ...

Elmer was sufficiently consoled not to agonize that week, yet not so consoled but that he became a humble and tender Christian. To the embarrassed astonishment of his children, he played with them eve...

Mannie Silverhorn was one of the best ambulance-chasers in Zenith. A hundred times he had made the streetcar company pay damages to people whom they had not damaged; a hundred times he had made motori...

When Mr. Mannie Silverhorn awoke at ten, with a head, he remembered that he had been talking, and with agitation he looked at the morning’s Advocate-Times. He was cheered to see that there was no trac...

When Mr. Mannie Silverhorn awoke at ten, with a head, he remembered that he had been talking, and with agitation he looked at the morning’s Advocate-Times. He was cheered to see that there was no trac...

It was not so much the clamor of the Zenith reporters, tracking him from his own house to that of T. J. Rigg and out to the country⁠—it was not so much the sketches of his career and hints of his unco...

At the second conference with Mannie Silverhorn and Oscar Dowler, Hettie was present, along with Elmer and T. J. Rigg, who was peculiarly amiable. They sat around Mannie’s office, still hearing Oscar’...

The afternoon papers had front-page stories reproducing Hettie’s confession, joyfully announcing Elmer’s innocence, recounting his labors for purity, and assaulting the booze interests which had bribe...

When the papers had first made charges against Elmer, Cleo had said furiously, “Oh, what a wicked, wicked lie⁠—darling, you know I’ll stand back of you!” but his mother had crackled, “Just how much of...

But for all that, would his congregation believe him? If they jeered when he faced them, he would be ruined, he would still lose the Yorkville pastorate and the Napap. Thus he fretted in the quarter-h...