Novels
See also: List of fictional United States PresidentsIn 1964 Irving Wallace published The Man, a popular novel addressing the idea of a black president, named Douglas Dillman in the book. Recently a critic described it as a window into "Kennedy-era racial pathologies", despite the author's liberal attitude. It included the portrayal of attractive mulatto women who could pass for white, as does the hero Dillman's own light-skinned daughter. The Man -- which was made into a 1972 movie starring James Earl Jones as Dillman—noted factors against a black president's being elected in America, and Dillman's coming to power through an unlikely series of circumstances of succession.
Other novels featuring a first black president include Philip K. Dick's The Crack in Space (1966), T. Ernesto Bethancourt's young adult novel The Tomorrow Connection (1984) and T.D. Walters' self-published thriller The Race (2007).
Read more about this topic: Black President In Popular Culture (United States)
Famous quotes containing the word novels:
“Of all my novels this bright brute is the gayest.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“I have just opened Bacon’s “Advancement of Learning” for the first time, which I read with great delight. It is more like what Scott’s novels were than anything.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don’t know—Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel—the quality of philosophy.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)