#46 in Dystopian
It Can't Happen Here
- 376
- Pages
- about 7 h
- Reading time
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Our view
“It Can’t Happen Here” still unsettles as a 1935 picture of an American dictatorship taking hold. Sinclair Lewis sets the rise of Buzz Windrip against Doremus Jessup, the newspaper editor who sees it coming. Readers widely find the telling wordy and tangled, and some lose the thread of its period references and asides. What brings them back is the subject, which they find uncomfortably current.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
It Can't Happen Here is a 1935 dystopian political novel by the American author Sinclair Lewis. Set in a fictionalized version of the 1930s United States, it follows an American politician, Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, who quickly rises to power to become the country's first outright dictator, and Doremus Jessup, a newspaper editor who sees Windrip's fascist policies for what they are ahead of time and who becomes Windrip's most ardent critic.
Where the score comes from
The sources average 7.6 across 106 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 42% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Dystopian average of 7.7. That is how 7.7 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 7.3 | 20 | 19% |
| Hardcover | 7.6 | 86 | 81% |
Frequently asked
How long is It Can't Happen Here?
It has 376 pages — shorter than 66% of the ranked books in Dystopian.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Dystopian — with scores between 7.1 and 7.9, closest to this book.
