Presidential Mission

Upton Sinclair

ene 2016 · The Lanny Budd Novels Libro 8 · Open Road Media

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America is at war, and Lanny Budd risks life and limb from North Africa to Moscow on behalf of the Allied cause in this “absorbing” historical novel (The New York Times).

Members of the German high command believe that American art expert Lanny Budd is sympathetic to their cause, but since 1938 he has been an undercover agent working for President Franklin Roosevelt. Now, in 1941, the United States has been pulled into the fray by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and Lanny’s services are required more than ever.

In Algiers he must convince the French troops to stand with the Allies in advance of the Axis invasion. A meeting in Moscow, intended to sway Communist despot Joseph Stalin, precedes Hitler’s disastrous decision to invade Russia. Over the course of the next two years, Lanny faces death at virtually every turn as his important presidential missions carry him from the sands of the African desert to the bomb-blasted streets of Berlin.
 
Presidential Mission is the electrifying eighth chapter of Upton Sinclair’s Pulitzer Prize–winning dramatization of twentieth-century world history. An astonishing mix of adventure, romance, and political intrigue, the Lanny Budd Novels are a testament to the breathtaking scope of the author’s vision and his singular talents as a storyteller.

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Upton Sinclair (1878–1968) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, activist, and politician whose novel The Jungle (1906) led to the passage of the Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. Born into an impoverished family in Baltimore, Maryland, Sinclair entered City College of New York five days before his fourteenth birthday. He wrote dime novels and articles for pulp magazines to pay for his tuition, and continued his writing career as a graduate student at Columbia University. To research The Jungle, he spent seven weeks working undercover in Chicago’s meatpacking plants. The book received great critical and commercial success, and Sinclair used the proceeds to start a utopian community in New Jersey. In 1915, he moved to California, where he founded the state’s ACLU chapter and became an influential political figure, running for governor as the Democratic nominee in 1934. Sinclair wrote close to one hundred books during his lifetime, including Oil! (1927), the inspiration for the 2007 movie There Will Be Blood; Boston (1928), a documentary novel revolving around the Sacco and Vanzetti case; The Brass Check, a muckraking exposé of American journalism; and the eleven novels in the Pulitzer Prize–winning Lanny Budd series.