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Buchanan Dying
  • Published: 15 April 2013
  • ISBN: 9780812984903
  • Imprint: Random House US Group
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $32.99
Categories:

Buchanan Dying

A Play

Formats & editions
Paperback
15 Apr 2013
EBook
9 Apr 2013
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Appearing for the first time in trade paperback and using the definitive text, here is America's greatest 20th-century belletrist's only work for the stage.

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.
  • Published: 15 April 2013
  • ISBN: 9780812984903
  • Imprint: Random House US Group
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $32.99
Categories:

About the author

John Updike

JOHN UPDIKE is the author of more than sixty books, eight of them collections of poetry. His novels won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle, and the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in January 2009.
portrait photo of John Updike

Also by John Updike

A Life in Letters
Selected Poems
Foreword
More Matter
Higher Gossip
Rich In Russia
My Father's Tears and Other Stories
See all

Praise for Buchanan Dying

  • Buchanan Dying is "an abundant, even opulent, creative act...very often Mr. Updike's fantastic talent for mimicry produces quite marvelous results."--Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Atlantic Monthly
  • "Using the excuse of 19th century speech, Updike has indulged his love of beautiful, ornate prose; we can sink deep into sentences balanced like mobiles and turned like pots on the wheel."--Joyce B. Markle, The Chicago Tribune
  • "In the real-life figure of the too hastily judged James Buchanan...and in the unusual form of the 'play meant to be read'...John Updike has at last found vehicles for his gifts of compassion and capacity to create characters 'in the round.'"--Martin Seymour-Smith, The Financial Times (London)

  • Buchanan Dying is "an abundant, even opulent, creative act...very often Mr. Updike's fantastic talent for mimicry produces quite marvelous results."--Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Atlantic Monthly
  • "Using the excuse of 19th century speech, Updike has indulged his love of beautiful, ornate prose; we can sink deep into sentences balanced like mobiles and turned like pots on the wheel."--Joyce B. Markle, The Chicago Tribune
  • "In the real-life figure of the too hastily judged James Buchanan...and in the unusual form of the 'play meant to be read'...John Updike has at last found vehicles for his gifts of compassion and capacity to create characters 'in the round.'"--Martin Seymour-Smith, The Financial Times (London)

  • Buchanan Dying is "an abundant, even opulent, creative act...very often Mr. Updike's fantastic talent for mimicry produces quite marvelous results."--Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Atlantic Monthly
  • "Using the excuse of 19th century speech, Updike has indulged his love of beautiful, ornate prose; we can sink deep into sentences balanced like mobiles and turned like pots on the wheel."--Joyce B. Markle, The Chicago Tribune
  • "In the real-life figure of the too hastily judged James Buchanan...and in the unusual form of the 'play meant to be read'...John Updike has at last found vehicles for his gifts of compassion and capacity to create characters 'in the round.'"--Martin Seymour-Smith, The Financial Times (London)