Tom Fool

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A01=David Stacton
Author_David Stacton
Category=FBA
eq_bestseller
eq_fiction
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_modern-contemporary
eq_nobargain

Product details

  • ISBN 9780571320820
  • Weight: 248g
  • Dimensions: 129 x 198mm
  • Publication Date: 20 Nov 2014
  • Publisher: Faber & Faber
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Paperback
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'Yes, it was a crusade. But just what was it the people out there feared and hated so much? Not surely the candidate. He was a decent man. Or was that it?'

With Tom Fool (1962) David Stacton concluded a triptych of novels drawn from the history of America. For this final panel he turned his eye on politics. The titular protagonist is a fictional rendering of Wendell Wilkie, unlikely Republican challenger to Franklin D. Roosevelt in the presidential election of 1940. As 'Tom Fool' endures an epic campaigning tour of thirty-one states - assisted (or dogged) by his political advisor 'Sideboard' and husband-and-wife PR consultants the Pattersons - he finds himself uncomfortably reminded that America, in its vastness and contradictions, is more than one country, and a unique conundrum to one who would be President.

David Stacton (1923-1968) was born Lionel Kingsley Evans in San Francisco. He attended Stanford University before serving in the Civilian Public Service as a conscientious objector during World War II, eventually graduating from the University of California at Berkeley in 1951. Stacton went to Europe after college and ended up staying, in his words, 'because I liked it and because I could not get my books in print in America.' His first novel, Dolores, was published in England in 1954. Among the wide-ranging historical and biographical novels for which he would become best known are Remember Me, about Ludwig of Bavaria; On a Balcony, about Nefertiti and Pharaoh Akhenaten; Segaki, set in feudal Japan; A Signal Victory, about the Spanish conquest of the Yucatán; Old Acquaintance, set at a film festival and telling of the loves of a star resembling Marlene Dietrich; and People of the Book, set during the Thirty Years' War. In 1968 he moved to Fredensborg, Denmark, but ten days later he was found dead in his new home. He was forty-four years old.

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