One wishes the circumstances were different, but I think it’s exciting to see more people engaging with Lewis’ novel. Several bookstores I’ve been to recently have it placed prominently in their “staff picks” sections, and, in Berkeley, a stage adaptation is gaining a lot of media attention. Hopefully all of this will lead readers to see that American fascism was just one of many things Lewis scrutinized–after all, he also addressed American provincialism, capitalism, and (my favorite) evangelism.
Although It Can’t Happen Here is one of the most-famous American dystopian novels, Lewis is not the only author (nor even the first) to have written about this topic. In fact, this is something I once discussed in a short review-essay published in the Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter (Spring 2015). The book I reviewed was titled It Can Happen Here, a literary study that compares and contrasts Lewis’ novel with the works of Jack London (The Iron Heel, 1908) and Philip Roth (The Plot Against America, 2004). I have included below an excerpt, though you can read the full essay here.
In a new study of the American dystopian novel, CUNY professor emerita Claire Sprague writes in It Can Happen Here (Chippewa Books, 2013) that even though fascism never took hold in the United States, “the potential was and still is [h]ere” (99). To support this, the author turns to Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908), Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here (1935), and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004), each of which demonstrated that the threat is not an “invading army or ideology but … native fascist movements” (96). What is unique to these books is that they are not the dystopias of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) or Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron” (1961), tales of a distant future, parables of how all utopias are undermined by the worst of man and dystopias by his best, but instead are rooted firmly in the present. To a contemporary audience, these were cautionary probes into the near future. Some could even call them propaganda.