Advise and Consent: A Novel of Washington Politics.

DRURY, Allen.

Item Number: 4668

New York: Doubleday & Co., 1959.

First edition of the author’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and considered by many as the best novel ever written about the workings of the U.S. government. Octavo, original cloth. Inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “For Jack Kennedy- with friendship and best regards Al Drury.” Drury and Kennedy were friends when the latter was a Senator from Massachusetts. The author must have drawn on the many conversations he had with Kennedy while researching and writing Advise and Consent. Many consider the fictional Senator Anderson from the book to be based on Kennedy. His classic PT-109 story in the south Pacific is the foundation of Anderson’s war hero account: “One day in the Marianas…a Jap coming out of the sun eluded all their vigilance and shot his bomber down. For five days he kept himself and three other survivors alive in the jungle principally by main strength of character” (p. 287). Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box.

The Saturday Review said of Advise and Consent in August 1959 that "It may be a long time before a better one comes along." Roger Kaplan of Policy Review wrote in 1999 that the novel "in many ways invented a genre in fiction. The use of a racy intrigue, if possible involving both sex and foreign policy, is what characterizes the contemporary form. Forty years on, Advise and Consent is the only book of this genre that a literary-minded person really ought to read." The novel was adapted into the 1962 film Advise and Consent, directed by Otto Preminger and starring Walter Pidgeon and Henry Fonda.