Buchanan Dying: A Play

John Updike

Apr 2013 · Sold by Random House

About this ebook

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.

About the author

JOHN UPDIKE was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania; he attended Harvard College and the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, in Oxford, England.  From 1955 to 1957 he was a staff member of The New Yorker, to which he has contributed stories, poetry, and criticism.  He is the author of six novels, five short story collections, three books of poems, and a miscellany, Assorted Prose.  This is his first play.