Banned Books: It Can’t Happen Here

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Born in 1885, Sinclair Lewis went from rural Minnesota to Yale University to New York City and beyond. After earning his bachelor’s degree, Lewis became a journalist, novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, and sometimes lecturer. He earned commercial success with his early novels Main Street (1920), which spotlighted the potential power of imagination in small town America, and Babbitt (1922), which satirized materialism, consumer culture, unthinking adherence to social norms, and hypocrisy in a growing middle class. Soon after, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Arrowsmith (1925), which tackled the harmful effects of corruption, commercialism, and anti-intellectualism on modern medicine and science. He became the first author to decline the award. In his letter of refusal, Lewis criticized the award parameters for honoring not literary merit but “obedience to whatever code of good form may chance to be popular at the moment.” His books, he argued, did not aim to celebrate the American wholesomeness, manners, and manhood touted by the prize’s rhetoric. In 1930, Lewis became the first writer from the United States to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. During his Nobel Lecture, entitled "The American Fear of Literature," Lewis argued that American society feared any writing that did not blindly glorify the nation. He took aim at complacency and conformity, especially among the middle class, and lauded authors like Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway, whom he called “wicked, these colleagues of mine” for shaking off “safe, sane, and incredibly dull provincialism” and producing instead “passionate and authentic work.” He exhorted writers to keep taking risks to bring to life the deep complexities that imbued American society and culture. Then, in 1935, in the wake of the Great Depression, amid the rise of militant fascism abroad and volatile polarizing politics at home, Lewis published It Can’t Happen Here.

Lewis later said that he wrote and revised the novel in under four months, answering a sense of urgency he felt at threats to the democratic-republican polity of the United States. (He had already lived through one world war and watched the revving up of the U.S. propaganda machine and the suppression of voices of dissent. He was also influenced by his second wife, Dorothy Thompson, a renowned journalist who had recently interviewed Adolf Hitler and sounded the alarm on his rise to power. She, too, warned about the dangers of propaganda, misinformation, and authoritarian rhetoric.) Like other satirical and dystopian novelists before and after him— Yevgeny Zamyatin, H. G. Wells, Jack London, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Ray Bradbury—Lewis warned of a slide into authoritarianism not in other countries but in the United States. A cautionary tale, It Can’t Happen Here thumbs its proverbial nose at the idea that American democracy is too strong and American citizens too freethinking, too independent, too mindful to be hoodwinked by popular demagogues propagating false promises, distorted news, and blatant untruths in the quest to amass their own power. The novel’s protagonist, Doremus Jessup, is a conventional, liberal, small-town newspaper editor, comfortably seated in the middle class, fairly enamored of his family, who wants to believe the best of his fellow Americans while remaining alert to their follies, prejudices, and political susceptibilities. Benignly critical, he unwittingly watches a blustering charismatic politician named Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip rise to power. Jessup mistakenly believes that Windrip is so overtly corrupt and comical and absurd that no one could possibly take him seriously. To his dismay, Windrip first wins the presidency, then dismantles the nation’s institutions, and ultimately transforms the United States into a police state. Though written in haste and somewhat more overt in his commentary and intent than other novels, It Can’t Happen Here proves eerily prescient on any number of points. As Martin J. Jacobi points out in a comparative analysis of Lewis, London, and Philip Roth, throughout Lewis' novel, Windrip and his acolytes repeatedly use totalitarian tools—the big lie (or the practice of continually repeating a lie despite efforts by others to correct it), doublethink (a type of reality distortion and control made more famous in Orwell’s 1984 as “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them”), scapegoating, and false ethos (or the making of unrepresentative and even untrue images, such as the idea that the wealthy, amoral Windrip is a common, devout “man of the people”). Sounds kind of like a blueprint for our present timeline, right?

The novel provoked immediate controversy and plans by MGM to produce a film adaptation were scuttled amid the darking climate of political suspicion. However, in 1936, the Federal Theatre Project staged the in 21 theaters across 17 states to widespread acclaim—earning the negative attention of Congressman Martin Dies, whose Congressional hearings, a precursor to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) investigations launched by Senator Joseph McCarthy, ultimately led Congress to pull funding from the Federal Theatre. In 2021, Texas state Representative Matt Krause included It Can’t Happen Here on a list of 850 books he proposed banning from schools. In Lewis’ novel, the state likewise takes aim first at journalists and then more broadly at literature: “All over the country, books that might threaten the Pax Romana of the Corporate State were gleefully being burned by the more scholarly Minute Men,” and one riveting scene details the seizing and subsequent burning of the Jessup family’s books. My tenth-grader just read Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, another book that has been challenged in multiple states, nominally because of its "coarse" and "dirty" language and its supposed irreligiosity (though really it just critiques commercialized religion and religious rhetoric appropriated for nefarious purposes). Not so ironically, 451's whole point is to caution people against the dangers of censorship, mass media distraction, and societal apathy toward intellectual freedom.

The American Library Association (ALA) reports: “In 2025, 92% of all book challenges were initiated by pressure groups, government officials, and decision makers, up from 72% in 2024. Less than 3% of challenges originated from individual parents.” It further reports that 4,235 unique titles were challenged in 2025, the second highest number in a year ever documented by ALA. Roughly 40 percent of those titles “represent the lived experiences of LGBTQIA+ people and people of color.” Among the most often challenged books are Sold by Patricia McCormick, The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe, Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo, and Looking for Alaska by John Green. Among the most challenged over time are Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, George Orwell’s 1984, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, and Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants series. Among most often challenged picture books? And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, The Family Book by Todd Parr, In the Night Kitchen and Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, and The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf. Really, there are too many to list here but you can check out plenty of lists on the ALA and Banned Books Week websites (listed below) or this fantastic list from the New York Public Library. You can often find curated lists at your local libraries and bookstores, too.

Across the nation, challenges to books at the local (school, library, and district), state, and federal levels have experienced a resurgence in recent years. PEN America documented 6,870 instances of books being banned in public-school districts during the 2024–25 school year, covering 3,743 unique titles across 23 states and 87 districts. (A "ban" in its methodology includes complete removal as well as restricted or diminished student access.) This included a surge in bans of nonfiction titles. In 2025, Utah, South Carolina, and Tennessee each enacted mechanisms for statewide book bans and removals from public schools. Other states adopted laws restricting content, mandatory review and rating laws, enhanced parental review measures, and more. Notably, a dozen states passed “Right to Read” laws intended to protect school/public libraries and librarians from censorship or retaliation. At the federal level, the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights dismissed complaints concerning alleged book bans and rescinded previous guidance under which removal of certain books could potentially raise civil-rights concerns. The Office of the Secretary of Defense ordered the removal of 381 books from the Naval Academy; a subsequent review by the Pentagon returned most of the books. The executive also reportedly ordered the removal of hundreds of titles from Department of Defense Education Activity schools. In 2026, H.R. 7661 proposed to restrict the use of federal education funding for certain books and programming described in the bill as containing “sexually oriented material.” This year, Banned Books Week is celebrated October 4 through October 10, and the ALA is calling on everyone to take some action to celebrate October 10 as Let Freedom Read Day. Need some ideas? Check out https://bannedbooksweek.org/let-freedom-read-day/.

To get a sense of the escalation in book challenges over the past decade, take a look at the graph below and then view the animated map on challenges across states from 2016 to 2025 that follows.

For now, I'm planning to post excerpts and/or audio clips or even video clips of the theater production of It Can’t Happen Here in the days leading up to and during Banned Books Week. I might toss in some others, too. Last year, I intended to read The Giver by Lois Lowry, which has amassed thousands of challenges over the decades and was the 11^th most challenged book in the 1990s, because hey, an accounting of history that includes society’s faults and setbacks? That’s dangerous to those who want to take and hold onto power. I only managed to get through part of it (reading aloud, that is), so I might try to continue with that as well. In the meantime, you might also check out this list of books about book bans and censorship, which includes wonderful titles like these:

And a few notable quotes from It Can’t Happen Here ...

Lewis describes Windrip:

“The Senator was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his ‘ideas’ almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humor the sly cynicism of a country store. … There was no more overwhelming actor on the stage, in the motion pictures, nor even in the pulpit. He would whirl arms, bang tables, glare from mad eyes, vomit Biblical wrath from a gaping mouth; but he would also coo like a nursing mother, beseech like an aching lover, and in between tricks would coldly and almost contemptuously jab his crowds with figures and facts—figures and facts that were inescapable even when, as often happened, they were entirely incorrect.”

Jessup’s son-in-law, an esteemed physician, tries to assure Jessup:

“Why, America’s the only free nation on earth. Besides! Country’s too big for a revolution. No, no! Couldn’t happen here!”

And Jessup himself eventually laments:

“The tyranny of this dictatorship isn’t primarily the fault of Big Business, nor of the demagogues who do their dirty work. It’s the fault of Doremus Jessup! Of all the conscientious, respectable, lazy-minded Doremus Jessups, who have let the demagogues wriggle in, without fierce enough protest.”

References and Resources:

Christina Dendy Writes

Banned Books: It Can’t Happen Here

“Why, America’s the only free nation on earth. Besides! Country’s too big for a revolution. No, no! Couldn’t happen here!”

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