<P> The Grasshopper Lies Heavy postulates that President Roosevelt survives an assassination attempt but forgoes re-election in 1940, honoring George Washington's two - term limit . The next president, Rexford Tugwell, removes the Pacific Fleet from Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, saving it from Japanese attack, which ensures that the U.S. enters the conflict a well - equipped naval power . The United Kingdom retains most of its military - industrial strength, contributing more to the Allied war effort, leading to Rommel's defeat in North Africa; the British advance through the Caucasus to fight alongside the Soviets to victory in the Battle of Stalingrad; Italy reneges on its membership in the Axis Powers and betrays them; British tanks and the Red Army jointly conquer Berlin; at the end of the war, the Nazi leaders--including Adolf Hitler--are tried for their war crimes, wherein the Führer's last words are Deutsche, hier steh' ich ("Germans, here I stand"), in imitation of Martin Luther . </P> <P> After the war, Winston Churchill remains the British Prime Minister, and, because of its military - industrial might, the British Empire does not collapse . The Soviet Union, crippled by war losses, collapses . The U.S. establishes strong business relations with Chiang Kai - shek's right - wing regime in China after vanquishing the Communist Mao Zedong in the Chinese Civil War . The British Empire becomes more racist and expansionist post-war, while the U.S. outlaws Jim Crow laws, resolving its racism by the 1950s . Both changes provoke racial - cultural tensions between the U.S. and the U.K., leading them to a Cold War for global hegemony between their two vaguely liberal, democratic, capitalist societies . Although the end of the novel is never depicted in the text, one character claims the book ends with the British Empire eventually defeating the U.S., becoming the sole world superpower . </P> <P> Dick said he conceived The Man in the High Castle when reading Bring the Jubilee (1953), by Ward Moore, which occurs in an alternative nineteenth - century U.S. wherein the Confederate States of America won the American Civil War . In the acknowledgments to the book, he mentions other influences: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960), by William L. Shirer; Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1962), by Alan Bullock; The Goebbels Diaries (1948), Louis P. Lochner, translator; Foxes of the Desert (1960), by Paul Carrell; and the 1950 translation of the I Ching by Richard Wilhelm . </P> <P> The acknowledgments have three references to traditional Japanese and Tibetan poetic forms; (i) volume one of the Anthology of Japanese Literature (1955), edited by Donald Keene, from which is cited the haiku on page 48; (ii) from Zen and Japanese Culture (1955), by Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, from which is cited a waka on page 135; and (iii) the Tibetan Book of the Dead (1960), edited by W.Y. Evans - Wentz . </P>

Summary of the man in the high castle book