I’m currently re-reading a classic work of fiction, Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here. Now possibly out of print (although the NAL edition from 2055 seems available at Amazon), the book deals with the rise of fascism in America in the 1930s, propelled by a populist senator who runs for president. The senator’s supporters include the fictional Bishop Prang, who holds forth from his own radio station preaching a raging form of national socialism no different from that found in Germany and Italy at the time. Yet along for the ride is the whole spectrum of the American public and every vocation in the land. Only a few stand against this tide of boorish, brutish, collectivist ideology.
My own copy I bought in 1986 at a used bookstore in Bergen, Norway, for the princely sum of 60 kroner. As I had no money at the time, those $10 meant a lot to me. Sadly, I remember little of the book, for as I read it now I am struck with the lucid prose and Cassandra-like warnings in the book. Lewis, from what I have read, seems both critical of capitalism and socialism (as they were seen back then), and became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in literature (1930).
