#sinclair lewis

Vast is the power of cities to reclaim the wanderer.

-- Sinclair Lewis

It Can't Happen Here was first published on 21 October 1935.

Dorothy Thompson (who married Sinclair Lewis in 1928) was the head of the New York Evening Post's Berlin bureau in Germany in 1927 and reported firsthand the rise of Nazi Germany. She interviewed Adolf Hitler for the first time in 1931, and she wrote about the dangers of him gaining control of Germany (she described Hitler as "inconsequent and voluble, ill poised and insecure. He is the very prototype of the little man" and Nazism as the "apotheosis of collective mediocrity in all its forms"). She was expelled from Germany in 1934 (the first American journalist to be removed from the country).

Lewis saw a corollary between Hitler and Huey Long (former Governor of Louisiana and US Senator who was preparing to run for President - Long was assassinated on 10 September 1935, just before the novel's publication) and began work on a novel about a demagogue becoming President of the United States, which ultimately results in another US Civil War.

MGM purchased the rights to the novel before it was published and a script had been completed by early 1936 with John Barrymore, Virginia Bruce, and Basil Rathbone announced as cast. It is reported that studio head Louis B. Mayer was warned that the script was "too anti-fascist" and would cause problems with the German film market and the film was delayed indefinitely. There were conversations about rewriting the script after the success of Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940) but with a different ending where the US dictator is "kicked out by disgruntled Americans as soon as they realized what had happened." That version was quickly rejected as well.