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Every Friday, at 11:00 am, on the library’s YouTube Channel and Facebook Page, the library will stream a brand new recording of local thespian, Joseph Coté reading aloud selections from a wide variety of fascinating and entertaining books of fiction and non-fiction.
For May 23, Coté will read aloud from Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here.
The 1930 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to American novelist Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951). He is the first American Nobel laureate in literature.
Summary: It Can’t Happen Here is a 1935 dystopian political novel by the American Nobel Prize winning 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 (in allusion to Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Nazi Germany), 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.
It Can’t Happen Here. Are we so sure?
Many would suggest that the horrifying Hitler era of world history certainly could happen ”here” or anywhere which is precisely the point that Sinclair Lewis was making when he wrote the book in 1935, a few years before the worst fears would indeed unfold in Germany, giving the book a prophetic nature and a key place in American literature of the period..
Click the links to find the library’s YouTube Channel and Facebook Page.
Thoughts to share? Book ideas to suggest?
Contact Joseph at friday-explorations@usa.net