There’s a good story in here somewhere. The premise is intriguing. What would’ve happened had a populist presidential candidate, who campaigned on the promise that he would give the lower classes exactly what they wanted, had won the 1936 presidential election? The result is a watered-down version of Nazi Germany in Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here. This book has seen a boon in sales recently, seeing as how we have elected a populist president who’s given the lower-classes (i.e. blue-collar Whites) what they wanted. […]
It’s already happening here…so why am I reading about it?
After A chose 1984 for Book Club in March, F decided to continue our dystopian theme by picking Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, which has gained national prominence and attention in the last year. I’ve heard that it was an accurate depiction of what is currently happening here in the United States, and I was curious about reading a book that seemed to line up so closely to current events, especially since this tome was written in the 1930s. In the age of Trump, […]
It Probably Can’t Happen Here, Right?
This 1935 novel about the elevation of a populist con-artist with fascistic tendencies to the highest office in the land is just the sort of escapist reading to really take your mind off your troubles these days. In all seriousness, depending on your perspective this is either the worst or the best time to cross Sinclair Lewis’s late-career polemic off your to-be-read list. The description of the fictitious Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip’s rise to power will in most respects feel all too familiar to anyone who […]