Kate’s 2¢: “Elmer Gantry” by Sinclair Lewis

“Elmer Gantry” by Sinclair Lewis

NOTE: There is a plethora of in-depth biographies of authors and reviews of their books, that state the title, author, published date, and genre; as well as, describing what the book is about, setting, and character(s), so, Kate’s 2¢ shares her thoughts about what she’s read. In her opinion…

   Jack Hrkach did a good job of reading this lengthy novel. I can see how the discussions of religion might have up-set some people, even in today’s culture.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Harry Sinclair Lewis (February 7, 1885 – January 10, 1951) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. In 1930, he became the first author from the United States (and the first from the Americas) to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded “for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters.” Lewis wrote six popular novels: Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927), Dodsworth (1929), and It Can’t Happen Here (1935).

Several of his notable works were critical of American capitalism and materialism during the interwar period.[1] Lewis is respected for his strong characterizations of modern working women. H. L. Mencken wrote of him, “[If] there was ever a novelist among us with an authentic call to the trade … it is this red-haired tornado from the Minnesota wilds.”[2]

Early life[edit]

Lewis was born February 7, 1885, in the village of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, to Edwin J. Lewis, a physician of Welsh descent,[3] and Emma Kermott Lewis. He had two older siblings, Fred (born 1875) and Claude (born 1878). His father was a stern disciplinarian, who had difficulty relating to his sensitive, unathletic third son. Lewis’s mother died in 1891. The next year Edwin married Isabel Warner, who young Lewis apparently liked. Lewis began reading books while young, and kept a diary. Throughout his lonely boyhood, the ungainly child—tall, extremely thin, stricken with acne and somewhat pop-eyed—had trouble making friends and pined after local girls. At the age of 13, he ran away from home and unsuccessfully tried to become a drummer boy in the Spanish–American War.[4] In late 1902, Lewis left home for a year at Oberlin Academy (the then-preparatory department of Oberlin College) to qualify for acceptance at Yale University. While at Oberlin, he developed a religious enthusiasm that waxed and waned for much of his remaining teenage years. Lewis later became an atheist.[5] He entered Yale in 1903, but did not receive his bachelor’s degree until 1908, taking time off to work at Helicon Home Colony, Upton Sinclair’s cooperative-living colony in Englewood, New Jersey, and to travel to Panama. Lewis’s undistinguished looks, country manners and seeming self-importance made it difficult for him to win and keep friends at Oberlin and Yale. He did make a few friends among the students and professors, some of whom recognized his promise as a writer.[6]

Career[edit]

Lewis’s earliest published creative work—romantic poetry and short sketches—appeared in the Yale Courant and the Yale Literary Magazine, of which he became an editor. After graduation Lewis moved from job to job and from place to place in an effort to make ends meet, writing fiction for publication and to chase away boredom. In the summer of 1908, Lewis worked as an editorial writer at a newspaper in Waterloo, Iowa. He moved to the Carmel-by-the-Sea writers’ colony near Monterey, California, in September 1908, to work for the MacGowan sisters and to meet poet George Sterling in person. He left Carmel after six months, moving to San Francisco where Sterling helped him get a job at the San Francisco Evening Bulletin. Lewis returned to Carmel in spring 1910 and met Jack London.[7][8]

While working for newspapers and publishing houses he developed a facility for turning out shallow, popular stories that were purchased by a variety of magazines. He also earned money by selling plots to London, including one for the latter’s unfinished novel The Assassination Bureau, Ltd.

Lewis’s first published book was Hike and the Aeroplane, a Tom Swift-style potboiler that appeared in 1912 under the pseudonym Tom Graham.

Sinclair Lewis’s first serious novel, Our Mr. Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man, appeared in 1914, followed by The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life (1915) and The Job (1917). That same year also saw the publication of another potboiler, The Innocents: A Story for Lovers, an expanded version of a serial story that had originally appeared in Woman’s Home Companion. Free Air, another refurbished serial story, was published in 1919.

Commercial success[edit]

Upon moving to Washington, D.C., Lewis devoted himself to writing. As early as 1916, he began taking notes for a realistic novel about small-town life. Work on that novel continued through mid-1920, when he completed Main Street, which was published on October 23, 1920.[9] His biographer Mark Schorer wrote in 1961 that the phenomenal success of Main Street “was the most sensational event in twentieth-century American publishing history”.[10] Lewis’s agent had the most optimistic projection of sales at 25,000 copies. In its first six months, Main Street sold 180,000 copies,[11] and within a few years, sales were estimated at two million.[12] Richard Lingeman wrote in 2002, “Main Street made [Lewis] rich—earning him about 3 million current dollars” (almost $5 million, as of 2022).[13]

Lewis followed up this first great success with Babbitt (1922), a novel that satirized the American commercial culture and boosterism. The story was set in the fictional Midwestern town of Zenith, Winnemac, a setting to which Lewis returned in future novels, including Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, Gideon Planish and Dodsworth.

Lewis continued his success in the 1920s with Arrowsmith (1925), a novel about the challenges faced by an idealistic doctor. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, which Lewis declined,[14] still upset that Main Street had not won the prize.[15] It was adapted as a 1931 Hollywood film directed by John Ford and starring Ronald Colman which was nominated for four Academy Awards.

Next Lewis published Elmer Gantry (1927), which depicted an evangelical minister as deeply hypocritical. The novel was denounced by many religious leaders and banned in some U.S. cities. It was adapted for the screen more than a generation later as the basis of the 1960 movie starring Burt Lancaster, who earned a Best Actor Oscar for his performance in the title role. The film won two more awards as well.

From NLS/BARD/LOC:

Elmer Gantry DB22114

Lewis, Sinclair. Reading time: 16 hours, 4 minutes.

Read by Jack Hrkach.

Classics

A brazen ex-football player enters the ministry and, through his charisma, his half-plagiarized sermons, and his genius for promotion, becomes a powerful evangelist. This carefully researched novel, published in 1927, created a scandal by its attack on religious hypocrisy.

Downloaded: December 30, 2024

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Kate’s 2¢: “The Hour Before The Dawn” by William Somerset Maugham

“The Hour Before The Dawn” by William Somerset Maugham

NOTE: There is a plethora of in-depth biographies of authors and reviews of their books, that state the title, author, published date, and genre; as well as, describing what the book is about, setting, and character(s), so, Kate’s 2¢ shares her thoughts about what she’s read. In her opinion…

   My Mother used to belong to a Book-of-the-Month Club and had many books in her library. I remember there were several of William Somerset Maugham’s books, but I don’t remember reading any of then. That is why I down-loaded this book.

   I enjoyed the character development, descriptions of the estate, and contrasting the life on the estate versus life in London during the war. I did not like the ending, though.  

   Graeme Malcolm did a great job of narrating this story.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

William Somerset Maugham[n 2] CH (/mɔːm/ MAWM; 25 January 1874 – 16 December 1965)[n 1] was an English writer, known for his plays, novels and short stories. Born in Paris, where he spent his first ten years, Maugham was schooled in England and went to a German university. He became a medical student in London and qualified as a physician in 1897. He never practised medicine, and became a full-time writer. His first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), a study of life in the slums, attracted attention, but it was as a playwright that he first achieved national celebrity. By 1908 he had four plays running at once in the West End of London. He wrote his 32nd and last play in 1933, after which he abandoned the theatre and concentrated on novels and short stories.

Maugham’s novels after Liza of Lambeth include Of Human Bondage (1915), The Moon and Sixpence (1919), The Painted Veil (1925), Cakes and Ale (1930) and The Razor’s Edge (1944). His short stories were published in collections such as The Casuarina Tree (1926) and The Mixture as Before (1940); many of them have been adapted for radio, cinema and television. His great popularity and prodigious sales provoked adverse reactions from highbrow critics, many of whom sought to belittle him as merely competent. More recent assessments generally rank Of Human Bondage – a book with a large autobiographical element – as a masterpiece, and his short stories are widely held in high critical regard. Maugham’s plain prose style became known for its lucidity, but his reliance on clichés attracted adverse critical comment.

During the First World War Maugham worked for the British Secret Service, later drawing on his experiences for stories published in the 1920s. Although primarily homosexual, he attempted to conform to some extent with the norms of his day. After a three-year affair with Syrie Wellcome which produced their daughter, Liza, they married in 1917. The marriage lasted for twelve years, but before, during and after it, Maugham’s principal partner was a younger man, Gerald Haxton. Together they made extended visits to Asia, the South Seas and other destinations; Maugham gathered material for his fiction wherever they went. They lived together in the French Riviera, where Maugham entertained lavishly. After Haxton’s death in 1944, Alan Searle became Maugham’s secretary-companion for the rest of the author’s life. Maugham gave up writing novels shortly after the Second World War, and his last years were marred by senility. He died at the age of 91.

Life and career[edit]

Background and early years[edit]

William Somerset Maugham came from a family of lawyers. His grandfather, Robert Maugham (1788–1862), was a prominent solicitor and co-founder of the Law Society of England and Wales.[5] Maugham’s father, Robert Ormond Maugham (1823–1884), was a prosperous solicitor, based in Paris;[6] his wife, Edith Mary, née Snell, lived most of her life in France, where all the couple’s children were born.[n 3] Robert Maugham handled the legal affairs of the British Embassy there, as his eldest surviving son, Charles, later did.[8][9] The second son, Frederic, became a barrister, and had a distinguished legal career in Britain – The Times described him as “a great legal figure” – serving as a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary (1935–1938) and Lord Chancellor (1938–1939).[8] The two younger sons became writers: Henry (1868–1904) wrote poetry, essays and travel books.[5]

exterior of grand building in neo-classical style

Maugham’s birthplace: the British Embassy in Paris

Shortly before the birth of the Maughams’ fourth son the government of France proposed a new law under which all boys born on French soil to foreign parents would automatically be French citizens and liable to conscription for military service. The British ambassador, Lord Lyons, had a maternity ward set up within his embassy – which was legally recognised as UK territory – enabling British couples in France to circumvent the new law, and it was there that William Somerset Maugham was born on 25 January 1874.[10] Maugham never greatly liked his middle name – which commemorated a great-uncle named after General Sir Henry Somerset[11] – and was known by family and friends throughout his life as “Willie”.[12]

Maugham’s mother died of tuberculosis in January 1882, a few days after his eighth birthday. He later said that for him her loss was “a wound that never entirely healed” and even in old age he kept her photograph at his bedside.[13] Two and a half years after his mother’s death his father died, and Maugham was sent to England to live with his paternal uncle Henry MacDonald Maugham, the vicar of Whitstable in Kent.[14]

After spending the first ten years of his life in Paris, Maugham found an unwelcome contrast in life at Whitstable, which according to his biographer Ted Morgan “represented social obligation and conformity, the narrow-minded provincialism of nineteenth-century small-town English life”. He found his uncle and aunt well-meaning but remote by contrast with the loving warmth of his home in Paris; he became shy and developed a stammer that stayed with him all his life. In a 2004 biography of Maugham, Jeffrey Meyers comments, “His stammer, a psychological and physical handicap, and his gradual awareness of his homosexuality made him furtive and secretive”.[15] Maugham’s biographer Selina Hastings describes as “the first step in Maugham’s loss of faith” his disillusion when the God in whom he had been taught to believe failed to answer his prayers for relief from his troubles. In his teens he became a lifelong non-believer.[16][n 4]

From 1885 to 1890 Maugham attended The King’s School, Canterbury, where he was regarded as an outsider and teased for his poor English (French had been his first language), his short stature, his stammer, and his lack of interest in sport.[19] He left as soon as he could, although he later developed an affection for the school, and became a generous benefactor.[20] A modest legacy from his father enabled him to go to Heidelberg University to study. His aunt, who was German, arranged accommodation for him, and aged sixteen he travelled to Germany. For the next year and a half he studied literature, philosophy and German. During his time in Heidelberg he had his first sexual affair; it was with John Ellingham Brooks, an Englishman ten years his senior.[21] Brooks encouraged Maugham’s ambitions to be a writer and introduced him to the works of Schopenhauer and Spinoza.[5] Maugham wrote his first book while in Heidelberg, a biography of the composer Giacomo Meyerbeer, but it was not accepted for publication and the author destroyed the manuscript.[22]

After Maugham’s return to Britain in 1892, he and his uncle had to decide on his future. He did not wish to follow his brothers to Cambridge University,[23] and his stammer precluded a career in the church or the law even if either had attracted him.[24] His uncle ruled out the civil service, believing that it was no longer a career for gentlemen after reforms requiring applicants to pass an entrance examination.[22] A family friend found Maugham a position in an accountant’s office in London, which he endured for a month before resigning.[25] The local physician in Whitstable suggested the medical profession, and Maugham’s uncle agreed. Maugham, who had been writing steadily since he was 15, intended to make his career as an author, but he dared not tell his guardian.[25] From 1892 until he qualified in 1897, he studied medicine at St Thomas’s Hospital Medical School in Lambeth.[5]

From NLS/BARD/LOC:

The hour before the dawn: a novel DB62946

Maugham, W. Somerset, (William Somerset). Reading time: 6 hours, 38 minutes.

Read by Graeme Malcolm.

Classics

Literature

The trials of the aristocratic Henderson family during early World War II. Eldest son Roger works for British intelligence while his neglected wife falls for another man. But it is the relationship of Roger’s brother Jim, a conscientious objector in love with an Austrian refugee, that leads to tragedy. 1941.

Downloaded: December 30, 2024

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Kate’s 2¢: “Bright burning things” by Lisa Harding

“Bright burning things” by Lisa Harding

NOTE: There is a plethora of in-depth biographies of authors and reviews of their books, that state the title, author, published date, and genre; as well as, describing what the book is about, setting, and character(s), so, Kate’s 2¢ merely shares her thoughts about what she reads. Inho…

   Parts of this story was hard to listen to. Lisa Harding

Did a good job of reading her novel.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Lisa Harding is an Irish writer, actress, and playwright whose work spans on fictional novels, play, anthologies and journals. She is considered an important voice in contemporary Irish literature, with her works contributing to discussions around social issues. Her novels engage readers with compelling stories while prompting reflection on the lives of those on the margins of society.[1][2][3][4]

Early life and education[edit]

Harding was raised in Dublin, Ireland, where she initially pursued a career in acting before focusing on writing. She completed an MPhil in creative writing from Trinity College Dublin in 2014, marking the beginning of her transition from acting to writing.[5][6][7]

   Harding’s literary debut came with the novel Harvesting in 2017, which received critical acclaim for its exploration of human trafficking and forced prostitution. The novel follows the lives of two young girls, one Irish and the other Moldovan, offering an emotional look at their exploitation. “Harvesting” won the 2018 Kate O’Brien Award and was shortlisted for an Irish Book Award and the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year.[7][9][10]

Her second novel, Bright Burning Things, published in 2021, addresses themes of addiction, motherhood, and redemption. The story is told through Sonya, a struggling actress battling alcoholism and the challenges of raising her son. Critics praised the book for its raw portrayal of addiction and its impact on family dynamics.[1][2][11][12]

Harding’s work is characterized by its emotional depth, complex characters, and exploration of difficult subjects such as addiction, exploitation, and redemption. Her background in acting contributes to her vivid portrayals and intense narrative voice.[8]

From NLS/BARD/LOC:

Bright burning things DB106123

Harding, Lisa. Reading time: 8 hours, 0 minutes.

Read by Lisa Harding.

Family

General

Psychological Fiction

Haunted by her failed acting career and lingering trauma from her childhood, Sonya fell deep into an alcoholic abyss. What kept her from losing herself completely was Tommy, her son. But her love for Tommy rivaled her love for the bottle. Unrated. Commercial audiobook. 2021.

Downloaded: July 22, 2024

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