Five novels that imagine dictatorship in America

NOVELISTS HAVE long imagined, and warned of, the threat to liberal places from totalitarian rule. British writers of the 20th century, including George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Robert Harris, won mass audiences for their depictions of anti-democratic dystopias. All owed a debt, in turn, to a disillusioned Russian revolutionary, Yevgeny Zamyatin, whose novel “We” described a dictatorial “OneState” of the 26th century, in which humans become mere “Numbers”—automatons who prioritise efficiency over freedom. His book, published in the early 1920s, provided an inspiration for Orwell’s “1984”. Authors across the Atlantic have fretted no less than Europeans about threats to democracy. Margaret Atwood, a Canadian, imagined America becoming a repressive religious republic, Gilead. Sinclair Lewis, who wrote soon after the Nazis were elected to power in Germany, told a story of the rise of populist, fascist government and the failures of ordinary American citizens to resist it. Phillip Roth picked up that theme seven decades later. Read these five novels as a chilling introduction to the idea of democracy under threat in America.