Timeline

• Aug 09, 2025: started reading.
• Sep 08, 2025: finished reading.

Review

When a book is dedicated to H. L. Mencken, you know it’s going to be good. When this dedication is immediately followed by the disclaimer:

No character in this book is the portrait of any actual person.

You know that you’re in for an incisive treat.

Chronicling the grotesque life and career of the titular character, it’s pretty shocking how much of the cultural criticism in this 100 year old novel still holds water in the present. The fact that this was written before the rise of Billy Graham and James Dobson and the rest means it borders on the prophetic.

I read this with an eye toward characterization and historical approaches to the subject of religious institutions in America. My thinking was that maybe, there would be some dated but relevant insights that I could modernize for an in-progress manuscript. I’m left here after finishing it, wondering if Sinclair Lewis didn’t already put the matter to bed when he wrote this in 1927.

Of course, he didn’t and I’ll still keep working on my own book. But damn if it isn’t depressing to realize the same reactionary moralism and compromised institutions have been present and at work in America for more than a century.