He grew up in Porterville, California, and earned a BA at Stanford University, where he joined Alpha Kappa Lambda, in the year 1939. He also had a sister named Anne Elizabeth.Īllen was a direct descendant of Lydia Rice (Edmund Rice’s daughter)and Hugh Drury, all of whom were once early immigrants to Massachusetts Bay Colony.

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.Allen Stuart Drury was born Septemin Houston, Texas to Flora Allen (a legislative representative for the California Parent-Teacher Association) and Alden Monteith Drury (a citrus industry manager, insurance agent, and real estate broker). The use of a racy intrigue, if possible involving both sex and foreign policy, is what characterizes the contemporary form. 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. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. For five days he kept himself and three other survivors alive in the jungle principally by main strength of character” (p. 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. Many consider the fictional Senator Anderson from the book to be based on Kennedy. The author must have drawn on the many conversations he had with Kennedy while researching and writing Advise and Consent. 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. Advise and Consent: A Novel of Washington Politics.įirst 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.

Advise and consent by allen drury