“The novel that foreshadowed Donald Trump’s authoritarian appeal.”—Salon 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. “Written at white heat.”— Chicago Tribune “Not only [Lewis's] most important book but one of the most important books ever produced in this country.”— The New Yorker  The son of a country doctor,  Harry Sinclair Lewis  (1885–1951) was born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota. His childhood and early youth were spent in the Midwest, and later he attended Yale University, where he was editor of the literary magazine. After graduating in 1907, he worked as a reporter and in editorial positions at various newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses from the East Coast to California. He was able to give this work up after a few of his stories had appeared in magazines and his first novel,  Our Mr. Wrenn  (1914), had been published.  Main Street  (1920) was his first really successful novel, and his reputation was secured by the publication of  Babbitt  (1922). Lewis was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for  Arrowsmith  (1925) but refused to accept the honor, saying the prize was meant to go to a novel that celebrated the wholesomeness of American life, something his books did not do. He did accept, however, when in 1930 he became the first American writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. During the last part of his life, he spent a great deal of time in Europe and continued to write both novels and plays. In 1950, after completing his last novel,  World So Wide  (1951), he intended to take an extended tour but became ill and was forced to settle in Rome, where he spent some months working on his poems before dying. Michael Meyer ,   PhD, a professor of English at the University of Connecticut, previously taught at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the College of William and Mary. His scholarly articles have appeared in such periodicals as American Literature ,  Studies in the American Renaissance , and  Virginia Quarterly Review . An internationally recognized authority on Henry David Thoreau, he is a former president of the Thoreau Society and the coauthor of  The New Thoreau Handbook , a standard reference. His first book,  Several More Lives to Live: Thoreau’s Political Reputation in America , was awarded the Ralph Henry Gabriel Prize by the American Studies Association. In addition to  The Bedford Introduction to Literature , his edited volumes include  Frederick Douglass: The Narrative and Selected Writings . SINCLAIR LEWIS IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE With an Introduction by Michael Meyer and a New Afterword by Gary Scharnhorst   Table of Contents Introduction Sinclair Lewis enjoyed a brilliant career in the 1920s portraying and satirizing what he regarded as the mediocrity, materialism, corruption, and hypocrisy of middle-class life in the United States. His five major novels of the twenties— Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927), and Dodsworth (1929)—were all bestsellers that served to hold a mirror up to the parochialism and provincialism of that decade. A good many Americans winced at their own reflections in those novels, but they eagerly bought Lewis’s iconoclastic books, because, however much they flinched at his representations of their middle-class lives, they were finally snugly, if not smugly, comfortable in the economic security that produced their prosperous confidence. After the stock market crash of 1929, however, there wasn’t much left of the middle class of the early 1930s. Many who were previously solid, respectable breadwinners found themselves on bread lines, soup lines, and relief rolls. “Normalcy,” a twenties password synonymous with security, gave way to the “jitters” as profitless corporations laid off millions of workers who drifted across the country like Oklahoma farm dust. The popular song and exuberant theme of the twenties “Ain’t We Got Fun” changed its tune to “Brother Can You Spare a Dime” during the Great Depression. Although Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first inaugural address in 1933 promised a New Deal, he also let his countrymen know what the score was in grim tones: Values have shrunken to fantastic levels; taxes have risen; our ability to pay has fallen; government of all kinds is faced