It Can't Happen Here
It Can’t Happen Here is the only one of Sinclair Lewis’s later novels to match the power of Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith. A cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy, it is an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America. Written during the Great...
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It Can’t Happen Here is the only one of Sinclair Lewis’s later novels to match the power of Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith. A cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy, it is an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America.
Written during the Great Depression, when the country was largely oblivious to Hitler’s aggression, it juxtaposes sharp political satire with the chillingly realistic rise of a president who becomes a dictator to save the nation from welfare cheats, sex, crime, and a liberal press.
Called “a message to thinking Americans” by the Springfield Republican when it was published in 1935, It Can’t Happen Here is a shockingly prescient novel that remains as fresh and contemporary as today’s news.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780451465641 (0451465644)
Publish date: 2014-01-07
Publisher: Signet Classics
Pages no: 416
Edition language: English
It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis, author; Grover Gardner, narrator The time is 1936. The Depression is a nightmare memory which has changed the mood of the country. There is political unrest, a charged atmosphere of distrust for government officials, anger at rich corporate giants, and a general...
I discovered this book after reading a collection of interviews by Howard Zinn where he described it as a warning about how the United States could become a fascist dictatorship. Zinn's argument was that the US is already heading down that road, though it has not quite reached that point at the time...
Written in the 30s, during the depths of the Depression, before World War II, this dystopian classic paints a grim picture of America's fall into it's own flavor of fascism. Some of his assertions stretched my belief nearly to the breaking point, most notable being the seemingly easy evaporation of...
Though written around 1934, this is a frighteningly prescient book considering the state of the country today. Lewis' presentation of the hero's time in an American concentration camp is particularly affecting.
A scary picture of what could happen in the US, if political issues/plans are deceptively presented. Some of it was a bit eerie for the connection to today, but I think the takeover in the book was far less gradual than were it to actually happen. The build-up of a dictatorship took about two years ...
9 years ago
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