| Product Summary | | Format: Multimedia Software | | ISBN: 9781433222092 | | Publisher: Blackstone Audiobooks | | Publish Date: 9/1/2008 | | Buy.com Sku: 206860480 | | Item#: | | Dimensions (in Inches) 7.5H x 5.25L x 0.5T |
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| | | First published in 1935, when Americans were still largely oblivious to the rise of Hitler in Europe, this prescient novel tells a cautionary tale of the fragility of democracy and offers an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America.
Annotation:
Nobel Laureate Sinclair Lewis's deeply disturbing and convincing novel charts the step-by-step movement of the United States towards becoming a fascist state after the election of Buzz Windrip, a plainspoken folksy president who promises security, an end to government handouts, and zero tolerance for leftist intellectuals. Once in power, Windrip proceeds to populate the Supreme Court with his lawyer friends, kowtow to corporate interests, defang the constitution, block the freedom of the press, and go to war with Mexico. Windrip rivals Elmer Gantry as a character of towering hypocrisy, his malevolence hidden behind an easy smile, his charm concealing his casual attitude towards rights and reality--he is both a polemical caricature and unnervingly believable, the banal monster that rises to power when a republic has grown too lazy to uphold its ideals. An astonishingly prescient book--it was written in 1935 when few could imagine the path Hitler's platform would lead to--IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE shows in sharp detail how the complacency of the American people can fatally undo the dream of democracy.
| PraiseChicago Tribune
"Powerful, great." |
| Author Bio| Sinclair Lewis | | Lewis, the son of a doctor, was born in the small Minnesota town he later reinvented in his novel MAIN STREET. He tried to enlist in the Spanish-American War when he was 13, but was brought back home by his distraught parents. He attended the local public schools, after which he went to Yale, where he never really felt accepted. He left in 1906 without a degree to work at Helicon Hall, Upton Sinclair's Utopian community, followed by an impulsive interlude when he traveled to Panama hoping (in vain) to help build the canal. He returned to Yale, however, and finally graduated in 1908. He then spent several years working at odd jobs and writing for newspapers as he traveled the U.S. He also began to write fiction, most of it negligible. In the 1920s he began to produce the handful of novels that would ensure his place in literary history, beginning with MAIN STREET (1920), which was enormously successful, selling hundreds of thousands of copies; it was followed by BABBITT (1922), ARROWSMITH (1925), ELMER GANTRY (1927), and DODSWORTH (1929), most of them satirical critiques of American middle-class complacency. All these novels were popular best-sellers, and contributed to America's postwar de-sentimentalized view of itself. After he became a literary lion, Lewis taught at Midwestern universities. He was married and divorced twice; his second wife was the well-known newspaperwoman Dorothy Thompson. When he became ill, in his mid-60s, he moved to Italy, where he died at 65 of heart disease. Lewis was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1930 "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humour, new types of characters." Lewis famously described himself as "a dull fellow whose virtue--if there is any--is to be found in his books." |
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