ELMER GANTRY Volume 1 by Sinclair LEWIS

ELMER GANTRY Tome 1 de Sinclair LEWIS - Translated from American by Régis Michaud - Introduction by Francis Lacassin - Series ‘‘Domaine étranger’’ directed by Jean-Claude Zylbersteien - Text in French - Édition 10/18 (92 Avenue de France, Paris) - 1985 - 318 pages - Softcover. Elmer Ganty appeared in the United States in 1927. Sinclair Lewis's Gantry, Nobel Prize winner in 1930, a high-colored adventurer, devoured by ambition, with a scandalous career, shocked Translated from American by Régis Michaud - Introduction by Francis Lacassin - Series ‘‘Domaine étranger’’ directed by Jean-Claude Zylbersteien - Text in French - Édition 10/18 (92 Avenue de France, Paris) - 1985 - 318 pages - Softcover. Elmer Ganty appeared in the United States in 1927. Sinclair Lewis's Gantry, Nobel Prize winner in 1930, a high-colored adventurer, devoured by ambition, with a scandalous career, deeply shocked the American public. This book is American from the first subdued snickers of the prologue to the ultimate and gigantic farce, as American as a skyscraper and our petty admiration for things that are not worth it. What happens there is, two-thirds, unimaginable anywhere but in the Land of Liberty and can be observed every day. The book is full of lucid, authentic and candid observations. It is bursting with truly gargantuan humor, which does not prevent it from touching the pathetic. Elmer Gantry with all his charlatanism, is fundamentally a sincere man and his sincerity is, in fact, what is most terrible about him. This mixture of a preachy Gil Blas and a Tartuffe is above all a wonderful novel character who deserved to be as well known as the famous Babbitt. (In Babbitt, S. Lewis had mocked the driving ambition of American society; through the rise of a small real estate agent, he had ridiculed the reason for living in America).