Read Elmer Gantry in Englishwith every sentence explained

Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis was first published in 1927. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction. It runs to about 152,100 words.

He drinks. He brawls. He chases women. And he has the most thrilling voice in the pulpit.

Elmer Gantry is the loudest, handsomest, most popular young man at his small Baptist college in Kansas: a football hero who loves whisky, girls and the sound of his own voice. Religion bores him. But his mother dreams of a preacher son, and one emotional revival night Elmer discovers that a crowd can be moved, and that moving it feels wonderful.

So he heads off to seminary, more interested in power than in faith, and learns that a big voice and a bold smile can open almost any door, as long as nobody looks too closely at what he does when the sermon is over.

Sinclair Lewis's fierce, funny satire caused a scandal on publication and was banned in several cities. The 1960 film won Burt Lancaster an Oscar.

Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in English. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:

• a natural translation of that exact sentence,
• a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
• the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
• all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.

It's marked advanced, with richer vocabulary and longer sentences. If it feels heavy, start with an intermediate English book and come back to it. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.