It Can't Happen Here
Written during the Great Depression, It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis’s novel satirizing American politics, describes the rise of a totalitarian regime in the United States. When Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip is elected president of the United States, he does so by inciting fear and dissent, promising massive economic and social changes in order to regain America’s prominence in the world. Once in office, he moves quickly to gain total control of the government and empowers a ruthless paramilitary force to carry out his rule and suppress all those who stand in his way.
Depicting a frightening world where fascism has taken hold in America, Lewis’s novel is a prescient and alarming tale of power, corruption, and how easily democracy…
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February 21, 2017Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1930, the first American novelist to be so honored. He was born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, the son of a doctor. After an extremely unhappy childhood, he went to Yale but left before graduation to work in Upton Sinclair’s socialist colony at Helicon Hall in Englewood, New Jersey. Unable to make a living as a freelance writer, he returned to Yale and graduated in 1908. In 1914 he published his first novel, Our Mr. Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man. But it was not until his sixth novel, Main Street (1920), that he won recognition as an important American novelist, the first to…