Set in Depression-era America, It Can't Happen Here tracks the rise of Senator "Buzz" Windrip and the corrosion of civic life as witnessed by editor Doremus Jessup. Lewis blends newspapery briskness with corrosive satire and documentary inserts-platforms, decrees, staged trials-to show how populist spectacle congeals into routine repression. Composed in 1935 amid the interwar crisis, it dissects loyalty oaths, paramilitaries, and bureaucratized cruelty within native traditions of boosterism and fear. Lewis, the first American Nobel laureate in literature, redirected his lifelong critique of conformity-from Main Street and Babbitt to Elmer Gantry-into a civic warning. With a journalist's training and a Midwestern vantage, he observed European fascism and homegrown demagoguery on radio and stump, then fashioned Jessup's stubborn, procedural resistance to show how ideology becomes habit. Readers of political history, journalism, and American studies will find a lucid field manual in narrative form-sobering yet humane. For citizens and students alike, it remains an indispensable, bracing companion for thinking about institutions, charisma, and the slow erosion of democratic norms.
Quickie Classics summarizes timeless works with precision, preserving the author's voice and keeping the prose clear, fast, and readable-distilled, never diluted. Enriched Edition extras: Introduction · Synopsis · Historical Context · Author Biography · Brief Analysis · 4 Reflection Q&As · Editorial Footnotes.
