Dispatches from the Classics Front

I’m in the middle of Elmer Gantry, which we’re doing for our monthly book discussion on August 25. Turns out people were pretty unhappy with Sinclair Lewis for poking fun at traveling evangelists. People were already pretty unhappy with him for how he depicted small town Minnesota in Main Street. I mean, they were mad enough that he felt the need to create a whole new fictitious Midwestern state so no one would get offended: Winnemac was supposedly located somewhere between Pittsburgh and Chicago. Hey wait – we’re between Pittsburgh and Chicago…..