Appreciating Allen Drury, Part II

Following up on yesterday’s post on Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent, John Beukema writes:
“Advise and Consent is one of my favorite books of all times. When I was younger, I used to reread it every year or so….At some point I read Drury’s memoirs of his time as the Senate correspondent for one of the wire services during WWII and was surprised to discover that several of the plot points in the novel were drawn to a greater or lesser extent from real events during that period. As were many of the characters — ‘the President’ and Harley Hudson, the VP, for example, were pretty plainly patterned after FDR and Harry Truman. The later books in Drury’s six-book cycle that started with Advise and Consent got increasingly pot-boilerish, and his still later books were so awful that I stopped reading him altogether, but Advise and Consent was a classic.”