Reading Group

The highly entertaining novels of American Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis, with their idiomatic dialogue and sharp eye for realistic detail, are currently being re-evaluated. None is more tellingly insightful than this 1935 account of the rise and fall of ignorant, but energetic populist President Berzelius Windrip, who brings tyranny and  chaos to the country he has been elected to govern. Written at a time when European Fascism was in the ascendant, It Can't Happen Here offered a shrewd, often appallingly funny corrective to American democratic complacency that has come to seem all the more relevant to the politics of the present day. RPJ