Between the Covers

Allen Drury had almost twenty years of experience covering politics in Washington, DC, as a newspaper correspondent before he published his first novel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Advise and Consent. A tale of political and sexual scandal in the nation's capital, the book was an immediate sensation when it was released in 1959. Drury's later novels have continued to follow in the tradition of Advise and Consent. Drury's subsequent novels also concern themselves with near-future Washington scenarios in which high-level bureaucrats and politicians battle against diplomatic crises and insider scandals. Writing in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Chris Wall describes Drury as "the political scientist's Robert Ludlum; the tension in his stories derives from crisp rhetoric, bold gambles and shrewd maneuvering. . . . The battles are fought with words, and most of the blood-spilling is done off-page. . . . It's skillfully written and quite engaging." Speaking of the novel Pentagon, in which Drury depicts an institution so stifled by bureaucracy and wracked by competing factions as to threaten national security, Schott finds that Drury makes the reader "feel his anger rise from a sense of despair." - from Contemporary Authors Onlinemore