Advise and Consent: A Novel of Washington Politics.

DRURY, Allen.

$2,800.00

Item Number: 29018

New York: Doubleday & Company, 1959.

First edition of the author’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Octavo, original cloth. Association copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “For Senator Clark with best regards Allen Drury.” The recipient Joseph S. Clark, Jr. was an American lawyer and politician. A member of the Democratic Party, he served as a United States Senator from Pennsylvania from 1957 to 1969. He previously served as the 116th Mayor of Philadelphia from 1952 to 1956. While in the Senate, Clark earned a reputation as a strong supporter of civil rights and congressional reform. He sponsored the Manpower Development and Training Act and the Area Redevelopment Act. An excellent example with some toning and rubbing in a very good first issue dust jacket with the $5.75 price and Doubleday imprint on the spine. Jacket painting by Arthur Shilstone. A very nice association, uncommon in the first edition and signed.

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.