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Illustrated portrait of Doremus Jessup / William Barton Dobbs

A character in It Can't Happen Here

Doremus Jessup / William Barton Dobbs

Doremus is the editor of the Fort Beulah Informer, a liberal skeptic more comfortable criticizing than organizing.

The book

Cover of It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis
It Can't Happen HereSinclair Lewis, 1935

An American dictatorship arrives through elections, promises, resentment, and a leader who insists only he can fix the country.

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Who they are in the book

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Doremus is the editor of the Fort Beulah Informer, a liberal skeptic more comfortable criticizing than organizing. Windrip’s dictatorship forces him to choose active resistance. He publishes underground material, survives Trianon concentration camp, escapes to Canada, and returns under the name William Barton Dobbs. He ends as a New Underground agent in Minnesota, with his personal fate unresolved.

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