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  • Published: 9 April 2013
  • ISBN: 9780812984910
  • Imprint: RH US eBook Adult
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256
Categories:

Buchanan Dying

A Play




To the list of John Updike’s well-intentioned protagonists—Rabbit Angstrom, George Caldwell, Piet Hanema, Henry Bech—add James Buchanan, seen above as a young Congressman in the 1820’s, and on the front cover as the harried fifteenth President of the United States (1857-1861).  In a play meant to be read, Buchanan’s political and private lives are represented as aspects of his spiritual life, whose crowning, condensing act is the act of dying.  A wide-ranging Afterword rounds out the dramatic portrait of one of America’s lesser known, and least appreciated, leaders.

  • Published: 9 April 2013
  • ISBN: 9780812984910
  • Imprint: RH US eBook Adult
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256
Categories:

About the author

John Updike

John Updike was born in 1932, in hillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker, and since 1957 has lived in Massachusetts. He is the father of four children and the author of more than fifty books, including collections of short stories, poems, essays, and criticism. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize (twice), the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal. A previous collection of essays, Hugging the Shore, received the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism.

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