One Summer: America, 1927

1927. Elmer Gantry was far and away the best-selling fiction work of the year. A satire on evangelist preachers, it was roundly condemned across the nation, especially by evangelist preachers. The fundamentalist preacher Billy Sunday, apprised of its content, called on God ‘to strike Lewis dead’, which doesn’t seem terribly Christian of him. The Reverend C. S. Sparkes of the Congregational Church of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, Lewis’s own home town, bitterly contrasted Lewis with the saintly Charles Lindbergh, saying that Lewis possessed a mind ‘that is dead – dead to goodness and purity and righteousness’, while Lindbergh was ‘clean in mind and soul’.
    Elmer Gantry was banned in several cities – in Boston, selling it was made an indictable offence, as opposed to just a misdemeanour, as an indication of how severely disagreeable it was – but of course such prohibitions merely made the book seem more juicily desirable to those who could get it. The novel sold 100,000 copies on its first day of publication, and was cruising towards 250,000 by the end of summer – numbers that not even Grey and Burroughs could count on.
    Elmer Gantry was the fifth in a string of critical and commercial successes for Lewis that made him the most admired writer of his day. The others were Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925) and Mantrap (1926). In 1930, he would be the first American awarded a Nobel Prize in literature. Not everyone was a fan. Ernest Hemingway, in a letter to his editor, said: ‘If I wrote as sloppily and shitily as that freckled prick I could write five thousand words a day year in and year out.’ Though Lewis had no sense of it just yet, 1927 would mark the apex of his career trajectory. His later novels would fall out of fashion and he would end up an alcoholic, so racked with delirium tremens that he would be confined in a straitjacket.
    Hemingway produced no novel in 1927. He was mostlypreoccupied with personal affairs – he divorced one wife and wed another in Paris in early summer, just about the time Lindbergh was flying in – but did come out with a volume of short stories, Men Without Women . Dorothy Parker in the New Yorker called it ‘a truly magnificent work … I don’t know where a greater collection of stories can be found,’ but the book didn’t stir the same public excitement as Hemingway’s debut novel of the previous year, The Sun Also Rises . Also well received, but not runaway commercial successes, were The Bridge of San Luis Rey by a new writer named Thornton Wilder, and Mosquitoes by another newcomer, William Faulkner.
    F. Scott Fitzgerald, the other American literary giant of the age – to us, if not to his contemporaries – produced no book in 1927. Instead he made his first trip to Hollywood, lured by a commission to write the screenplay for a movie called Lipstick . The fee was $3,500 up front with a further $12,000 on acceptance, but in the event his script was deemed inadequate and turned down, so the bulk of the fee was never paid. Fitzgerald also had a screen test, but he didn’t do well at that either. In the end, the trip to California cost him far more than he earned. Fitzgerald was fading fast in 1927. The Great Gatsby , published two years earlier, had been a failure. Unsold stacks of the book sat in the warehouse of Charles Scribner’s Sons, his publisher, and would still be there when Fitzgerald died, broke and all but forgotten, in 1940. Not until the 1950s would the world rediscover him.
    The publishing industry was in a state of interesting flux in 1927, and that was largely owing to a longstanding prejudice. Traditionally, publishing was closed to Jews (except at menial and dead-end levels). All the old firms – Harper & Brothers, Scribner’s, Doubleday, Houghton Mifflin, Putnam’s – were solidly white and largely Protestant, and their output tended to be carefully conservative. That began to change in 1915 when a young Jewish man named Alfred A. Knopf, the son of an advertising executive, started the imprint that still bears his name. Knopf brought America theworks of Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, André Gide, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, Thomas Mann and many others. The preponderance of foreign authors was explained simply by the fact that many American literary agents would not deal with a Jewish publisher.
    All this cast the conservatism of the old-line WASP publishers into sharp relief.