Oh Yes it Can: Sinclair Lewis' "It Can't Happen Here"
The novelist Sinclair Lewis was an awkward and gangly fellow from Sauk Centre, Minnesota, and an early and inveterate reader. After getting through Yale, Lewis kicked about writing for newspapers. All that changed spectacularly in 1920, as though Lewis had burst out of nowhere. The story of small town American provincialism, Main Street was a publishing sensation. It is a depiction of claustrophobic tedium imposed by perfunctory mores and circumscribed expectations.
A Pulitzer Prize was bestowed on Lewis’s controversial Arrowsmith, his story of an ethically burdened physician. Lewis told the Pulitzer crowd they could keep their award. Over that most creative decade, Lewis produced other memorable works like Babbit and Elmer Gantry. In 1930 he was the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Gracious in his Nobel acceptance speech he felt he did not have the creative strength to go forward. He confided to the actress Lillian Gish, “This is fatal. I cannot live up to it.”
Nonetheless Lewis continued to write. In October of 1935 he composed a tale with an eerie resonance and relevance. A cocktail disturbing and satirical and deadly serious: It Can’t Happen Here. A fascist takeover of the United States has been spearheaded by a fulsome, shallow-minded self-absorbed Big Mouth with a capacity to charm and entertain. This book is an affirmation of American democratic values over the authoritarian miasma then vitiating various nations. Hastily written by Lewis, he wanted the American populace to read this book and ponder the nightmarish barbarism of a militarized state.
Contemporaneous America had its own crop of demagogues hungry for power and influence. Lewis’s pages provide a cautionary narrative for these Trumpian times. One eminent critic pronounced that he had written “one of the most important books ever produced in this country.”
https://www.postalley.org/2025/07/26/oh-yes-it-can-sinclair-lewis-it-cant-happen-here/
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Very prophetic and frightening. It describes exactly what is going on today.
Highly recommended. Do take the time to read at the link. 
