The Novel Was Bad Enough

By the time the Hollywood rewriters get through there is often nothing left but the title—I remember particularly the long-vanished and unlamented Lives of a Bengal Lancer. In the film version of Elmer Gantry, Sinclair Lewis’ thirty-three-year-old exposé of the hot gospellers, the rewriters have retained about a third of the original. The book had a blunted point, the film has none at all.

In writing Elmer Gantry Sinclair Lewis fell flat on his face, a position he would retain for the rest of his life and from which not even the Nobel Prize could raise him. Main Street was his Bovary, summing up for the burgeoning debunking era his resentment that Sauk Center, Minnesota, could not be more like Greenwich Village. In Babbitt he ticked off the flatulent booster-Rotarian businessman and added, or almost added, a word to the language. (Lewis’ own cultural limitations are obvious in his picking for his hero’s name that of Harvard’s formidable neo-classicist.) With these two books he made his name as the ace novelist of the Mencken escadrille.

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Francis Russell

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By the time the Hollywood rewriters get through there is often nothing left but the title—I remember particularly the long-vanished and unlamented Lives of a Bengal Lancer. In the film version of Elmer Gantry, Sinclair Lewis’ thirty-three-year-old exposé of the hot gospellers, the rewriters have retained about a third of the original. The book had a blunted point, the film has none at all.

In writing Elmer Gantry Sinclair Lewis fell flat on his face, a position he would retain for the rest of his life and from which not even the Nobel Prize could raise him. Main Street was his Bovary, summing up for the burgeoning debunking era his resentment that Sauk Center, Minnesota, could not be more like Greenwich Village. In Babbitt he ticked off the flatulent booster-Rotarian businessman and added, or almost added, a word to the language. (Lewis’ own cultural limitations are obvious in his picking for his hero’s name that of Harvard’s formidable neo-classicist.) With these two books he made his name as the ace novelist of the Mencken escadrille.