Black President in Popular Culture (United States) - Novels

Novels

See also: List of fictional United States Presidents

In 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).

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Famous quotes containing the word novels:

    “An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
    —George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)

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    “Every reader of the Dreiser novels must cherish astounding specimens—of awkward, platitudinous marginalia, of whole scenes spoiled by bad writing, of phrases as brackish as so many lumps of sodium hyposulphite.”
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