It’s rural Indiana in the year 1900, and the laughs come thick and fast as Dr. Swarthmore, a clergyman with a cigar fetish, attempts to sell doomsday to his fellow Hoosiers at fifty cents per doom.
Dr. Swarthmore, bearded and grave, was a clergyman posted to rural Indiana. Late in the year 1900 he published a pamphlet in which he described the Second Coming and the end of the world. Blount, an uncanny youth with a divine gift for salesmanship, proposes a scheme for promoting the pamphlet, selling it by the thousands, and making a lot of money. A new century is at hand; fear of the future, Blount reasons, will render Indiana susceptible to the exalted and prophetic flavour of the pamphlet. Dr. Swarthmore, dazzled in spite of himself, falls in with this questionable marketing plan. At the critical moment, however, public opinion sways to science rather than religion; Dr. Swarthmore is undone.
This book does not have a serious bone in its body. Its plot is absurd. Its characters are cartoons. Among many other things, it is a satire on capitalist enterprise in general and the publishing industry in particular.