It Can't Happen Here is the only one of Sinclair Lewis's later novels to match the power of Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith. A cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy, it is an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America.

Written during the Great Depression, when the country was largely oblivious to Hitler's aggression, it juxtaposes sharp political satire with the chillingly realistic rise of a president who becomes a dictator to save the nation from welfare cheats, sex, crime, and a liberal press.

Called a message to thinking Americans by the Springfield Republican when it was published in 1935, It Can't Happen Here is a shockingly prescient novel that remains as fresh and contemporary as today's news.

With an Introduction by Michael Meyer
and an Afterword by Gary Scharnhorst

It Can't Happen Here is the only one of Sinclair Lewis's later novels to match the power of Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith. A cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy, it is an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America.

Written during the Great Depression, when the country was largely oblivious to Hitler's aggression, it juxtaposes sharp political satire with the chillingly realistic rise of a president who becomes a dictator to save the nation from welfare cheats, sex, crime, and a liberal press.

Called a message to thinking Americans by the Springfield Republican when it was published in 1935, It Can't Happen Here is a shockingly prescient novel that remains as fresh and contemporary as today's news.

It Can't Happen Here. Are we so sure? Many would suggest that it certainly could happen 'here, ' which is precisely the point that Sinclair Lewis was making when he wrote this book in 1935. This, incidentally, was still a few years before the worst fears would unfold in Germany, giving the book a somewhat prophetic flair.

Based on the American Democrat, Huey Long, it has been, despite that, often been associated with 'right wing' movements. This is ironic, as only a few years later it would be the Democrat FDR that would put American-Japanese citizens into concentration camps using 'emergency powers, ' much as the book's protagonist, Berzelius Windrip, was portrayed as doing, after beating FDR in 1936. In case you miss the irony: the real-life FDR actually did what the fictional Windrip was portrayed as doing!

The long history of abandoning civil rights using emergency powers was reprised more recently during the COVID pandemic, when Western nations and individual US states, ostensibly 'democracies, ' nonetheless invoked emergency powers to enact all sorts of authoritarian measures.

Thus, when pondering whether or not 'it can happen here' (which all assume it can) we are perhaps left with a more intriguing question: Why hasn't it happened here? And then, once this has been answered, work to ensure that the factors that have prevented a full-blown authoritarian regime from materializing in the United States are retained and strengthened.

In It Can't Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis crafts a chilling tale of a populist demagogue who rises to power in America, transforming the nation into a fascist dictatorship. This classic novel serves as a timeless warning about the fragility of democracy and the dangers of complacency in the face of tyranny.

A Penguin Classic

George F. Babbitt, a conniving, prosperous real estate man from Zenith, Ohio, revels in his popularity, his success, and, especially, in the material rewards they bring. He bullies his wife, flirts with other women, and patronizes the less successful. But when his best friend is sent to prison for killing his wife, Babbitt's middle-class complacency is shattered, and he rebels, seeking a more meaningful life. His small revolt is quickly defeated, however, by public opinion and his own need for acceptance. Babbitt captures the flavor of America during the economic boom years of the 1920's, and its protagonist has become the symbol of middle-class mediocrity, his name an enduring part of the American lexicon.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

A Penguin Classic

At the center of Main Street is Carol Kennicott, the wife of a town doctor, who dreams of initiating social reforms and introducing art and literature to the community. The range of reactions when it was published in 1920 was extraordinary, reflecting the ambivalence in the novel itself and Lewis's own mixed feelings about his hometwon of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, the prototype for Gopher Prairie.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Lewis's portrayal of a marriage torn by disillusionment and a woman forced into compromises is at once devastating social satire and persuasive realism. His subtle characterizations and intimate details of small-town America make Main Street a complex and compelling work and established Lewis as an important figure in twentieth-century American literature.

Universally recognized as a landmark in American literature, Elmer Gantry scandalized readers when it was first published, causing Sinclair Lewis to be invited to a jail cell in New Hampshire and to his own lynching in Virginia. His portrait of a golden-tongued evangelist who rises to power within his church--a saver of souls who lives a life of duplicity, sensuality, and ruthless self-indulgence--is also the record of a period, a reign of grotesque vulgarity, which but for Lewis would have left no trace of itself. Elmer Gantry has been called the greatest, most vital, and most penetrating study of hypocrisy that has been written since the works of Voltaire.

With an introduction by Jason Stevens

Arrowsmith, the most widely read of Sinclair Lewis's novels, is the incisive portrait of a man passionately devoted to science. As a bright, curious boy in a small Midwestern town, Martin Arrowsmith spends his free time in old Doc Vickerson's office avidly devouring medical texts. Destined to become a physician and a researcher, he discovers that societal forces of ignorance, greed, and corruption can be as life-threatening as the plague.

Part satire, part morality tale, Lewis's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel illuminates the mystery and power of science while giving enduring life to a singular American hero's struggle for integrity and intellectual freedom in a small-minded world.

With an Introduction by Sally E. Parry
and an Afterword by E. L. Doctorow

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Elmer Gantry is a satirical novel written by Sinclair Lewis in 1926 that presents aspects of the religious activity of America in fundamentalist and evangelistic circles and the attitudes of the 1920s public toward it. The novel's protagonist, the Reverend Dr. Elmer Gantry, is initially attracted by booze and easy money (though he eventually renounces tobacco and alcohol) and chasing women. After various forays into evangelism, he becomes a successful Methodist minister despite his hypocrisy and serial sexual indiscretions.

Elmer Gantry was first published in the United States by Harcourt Trade Publishers in March 1927, dedicated by Lewis to the American journalist and satirist H. L. Mencken.

The novel tells the story of a young, narcissistic, womanizing college athlete who abandons his early ambition to become a lawyer. The legal profession does not suit the unethical Gantry. After college, he attends a Baptist seminary and is ordained as a Baptist minister. While managing to cover up certain sexual indiscretions, he is thrown out of the seminary before completing his BD because he is too drunk to turn up at a church where he is supposed to preach. After several years as a travelling salesman of farm equipment, he becomes manager for Sharon Falconer, an itinerant evangelist. Gantry becomes her lover, but loses both her and his position when she is killed in a fire at her new tabernacle. After this catastrophe, he briefly acts as a New Thought evangelist, and eventually becomes a Methodist minister. He marries well and eventually obtains a large congregation in Lewis's fictional Midwestern city of Zenith. During his career, Gantry contributes to the downfall, physical injury, and even death of key people around him, including a sincere minister, Frank Shallard, who is plagued by doubt. Especially ironic is the way he champions love, an emotion he seems incapable of, in his sermons, preaches against ambition, when he himself is so patently ambitious, and organizes crusades against (mainly sexual) immorality, when he has difficulty resisting sexual temptation himself.

On publication in 1927, Elmer Gantry created a public furor. The book was banned in Boston and other cities and denounced from pulpits across the United States. One cleric suggested that Lewis should be imprisoned for five years, and there were also threats of physical violence against the author. Evangelist Billy Sunday called Lewis Satan's cohort.

However, the book was a commercial success. It was the best-selling work of fiction in America for the year 1927, according to Publishers Weekly.

Mark Schorer, then of the University of California, Berkeley, notes: The forces of social good and enlightenment as presented in Elmer Gantry are not strong enough to offer any real resistance to the forces of social evil and banality. Schorer also says that, while researching the book, Lewis attended two or three church services every Sunday while in Kansas City, and that: He took advantage of every possible tangential experience in the religious community. The result is a novel that satirically represents the religious activity of America in evangelistic circles and the attitudes of the 1920s toward it.

Shortly after the publication of Elmer Gantry, H. G. Wells published a widely syndicated newspaper article called The New American People, in which he largely based his observations of American culture on Lewis' novels.

Elmer Gantry appears as a minor character in two later, lesser-known Lewis novels: The Man Who Knew Coolidge and Gideon Planish. George Babbitt, the namesake of one of Lewis' best-known novels, appears in Elmer Gantry very briefly during an encounter at the Zenith Athletic Club. (wikipedia.org)

Babbitt basks in his pedestrian success and the popularity it has brought him. He demands high moral standards from those around him while flirting with women, and he yearns to have rich friends while shunning those less fortunate than he. But Babbitt's secure complacency is shattered when his best friend is sent to prison, and he struggles to find meaning in his hollow life. He revolts, but finds that his former routine is not so easily thrown over.

As timely as when it was first published in 1947, one need only open today's newspaper to see the same issues passionately being discussed between blacks and whites that we find in Kingsblood Royal, says Charles Johnson. Perhaps only now can we fully appreciate Sinclair Lewis's astonishing achievement.

Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith follows Martin Arrowsmith, a driven young doctor navigating the complexities of science, ethics, and ambition. This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a compelling exploration of medical ideals and human flaws, offering a timeless critique of the pursuit of scientific truth in a flawed world.

First published in 1920, Main Street is a biting and satirical look at small town America. Set in the 1910s it follows the struggles of its heroine, Carol Milford, to adapt to small town life. Carol, a young and progressive librarian living in St Paul, Minnesota, falls in love with and marries Will Kennicott, a doctor who dreams of returning to the small town of his childhood. Carol agrees and they move to Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, a town modeled on Sinclair's own hometown of Sauk Centre, Minnesota. Carol is disappointed by the town's drab appearance and it's provincial, small-minded inhabitants. Brimming with optimism and tenacity, she sets out to convince the town to modernize and embrace her progressive values. Her ideas are not received as she hoped and instead she is resisted at every turn and derided by her fellow townsfolk. For all its seeming bleakness, Carol is ever optimistic and refuses to give up or believe the fight isn't worth fighting. Main Street exemplifies Lewis' vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humour, new types of characters, which was cited by the Nobel Prize for Literature committee when he was awarded the prize in 1930. This edition is printed on premium acid-free paper.