Allen Drury Books In Order

Publication Order of Advise and Consent Books

Publication Order of Amarna Books

Publication Order of Mark Coffin Books

Publication Order of University Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Allen Drury
Allen Stuart Drury was born September 2, 1918 in 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). He also had a sister named Anne Elizabeth.

Allen 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.

He grew up in Porterville, California, and earned a BA at Stanford University, where he joined Alpha Kappa Lambda, in the year 1939. During this time, he wrote a column and editorials, and was the associate editor.

After he graduated from Stanford, he went to work for the Tulare Bee in Porterville in the year 1940, where he won the Sigma Delta Chi Award for editorial writing from the Society of Professional Journalists.

Then he moved to Bakersfield and wrote for the Bakersfield Californian, where he handled the “country news”.

On July 25, 1942, he enlisted in the U.S. Army in Los Angeles and trained as an infantry soldier, but due to an old back injury.

Late in 1943, he was a 25 year old army vet looking for a job. A position as the US Senate correspondent for United Press International provided him not just with employment, however, with insider knowledge of the Senate. Besides fulfilling his duties as a reporter, he kept up a journal of his views of both the Senate as well as individual senators. It was also kept to capture events of the 78th and 79th Congresses. His journals would not be published until 1963 as “A Senate Journal 1943-45.

After he left United Press, he worked freelance for a year, working on a column for local papers in the West, something that wasn’t very successful for him. Then he moved to Pathfinder Magazine, before moving to the Washington Evening Star, and here he gained a reputation for the quality of his writing. Select pieces he wrote during this time were collected into a volume titled “Three Kids in a Cart”.

He planned on staying in Washington for about a year, just to get some experience and head back to the coast. Allen ended up staying for twenty years.

The last series of novels he wrote, right before he died, were inspired by his experiences at Stanford. These are the “University” series of novels.

In the year 1960, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Best Book winner for “Advise and Consent”. It spent a record 102 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list. This novel was adapted into a well received play as well as a movie starring Henry Fonda and directed by Otto Preminger.

“Advise and Consent” was Allen’s first novel, which he wrote over seven years as he covered the Senate for the New York Times. Upon its success, he left The New York Times, and became a political correspondent for Reader’s Digest, however, wrote very little for it. From that point on, his sole major publications were his books.

He followed this up with sequels, one that portrayed racial tensions in the American South and in Africa, in “A Shade of Difference” (released in 1962). He then turned his attention to the next presidential election after these events in “Capable of Honor” (released in 1966) and “Preserve and Protect” (released in 1968).

From 1964 until he died, he lived in Tiburon, California. He finished his twentieth and final novel, called “Public Men” only two weeks before he died. He died on his eightieth birthday of cardiac arrest on September 2, 1998 at St. Mary’s Medical Center in San Francisco. He never married.

Even when Allen wrote in other genres, like historical and science fiction, they all maintain some political aspects in them.

“Advise and Consent” is the first novel in the “Advise and Consent” series and was released in the year 1960. This is a study of political animals right in their natural habitat. It is universally recognized as THE Washington novel.

It starts with Senate confirmation hearings for a liberal Secretary of State. The novel concludes just two weeks later, after a controversy and debate have exploded this issue into one major crisis.

Fans of the novel found this to be an excellent and entirely captivating read that is filled with surprises around every corner.

“The Throne of Saturn” is the first stand alone novel and was released in the year 1970. The satellite whirled all the way around the globe, just a tiny silver bauble lost within the infinitude of the sky. With its perfect precision that the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Pasadena built it with, it photographed on every pass the changing features of the busy planet under it.

Nothing escaped it, just like nothing escaped its many brothers from different lands, which also followed, each one in its particular polar or equatorial orbit. The activities of the nations that launched them as well as the activities of those nations’ enemies. Each one of them was on its guard.

“Public Men” is the third novel in the “University” series and was released in the year 1998. The brothers from a university frat house, the Class of 1939, are preparing for their reunion in the year 2001. By the eighties, Richard Emmett “Willie” Wilson, former student body president worked his way to the senate and considers a run for presidency. At the same time, Dr. Renny Suratt, Willie’s longtime nemesis and a political science professor at their alma mater, has helped groom Willie’s anti-Vietnam activist son, who was a veteran of that war, for his seat in the House.

When Willie does finally make his run for executive office, he must confront a hostile media, family conflicts, and the ever-changing political climate, one that that his son appears to embrace naturally. Over the course of the novel, he is supported by some old college friends, including the incisive Washington reporter Tim Bates and Duke Offenberg the affable college president. Only Renny, up in his ivory tower, is still Willie’s formidable and continual adversary.

One Response to “Allen Drury”

1. Elizabeth Matthews: 2 years ago

   Reading this was wonderful! I must have been 17 when I first read Advise and Consent, and my heart sang to the quality of these good men and their commitment to our country. I just read James Comey’s “A Higher Loyalty”; it immediately brought “Advise and Consent” to mind, and it felt almost like a fairy tail To read a real person struggling in today’s political crap – sometimes I questioned the reality of the being, James Comey. I read all this series, and “The Throne of Saturn”, and the politics of these later years has been such a deep disappointment, compared to those tales of ‘what could be’. I am going to investigate this site more. This was great!

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