To the list of John Updike's well-intentioned protagonists-Rabbit Angstrom, Richard Maple, Henry Bech-add James Buchanan, the harried fifteenth president of the United States (1857-1861). In what the author calls "a kind of novel, conceived in the form of a play," Buchanan's political and private lives are represented as aspects of his spiritual life, whose crowning, condensing act is the act of dying. This definitive edition includes a Foreword by Updike, discussing early productions of the work, the historical context in which it was written, and its kinship to his later novel Memories of the Ford Administration. A wide-ranging Afterword fleshes out this dramatic portrait of one of America's lesser known, and least appreciated, leaders.
