It Can't Happen Here (1935)

Sinclair Lewis asks how dictatorship would arrive in America, and answers: through a folksy populist senator who promises everything to everyone and wins the 1936 presidential election. Buzz Windrip's private militia, the Minute Men, and his loyal economic board follow quickly. The view is from Doremus Jessup, a small-town Vermont newspaper editor who assumed the title's comforting phrase was true. That is the book's lasting lesson: the danger lies less in the strongman than in the decent people who wait too long. Readers across the spectrum keep reaching for it whenever they fear a demagogue from the other side, which says something about how well it is built.