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:

    “The present era grabs everything that was ever written in order to transform it into films, TV programmes, or cartoons. What is essential in a novel is precisely what can only be expressed in a novel, and so every adaptation contains nothing but the non-essential. If a person is still crazy enough to write novels nowadays and wants to protect them, he has to write them in such a way that they cannot be adapted, in other words, in such a way that they cannot be retold.”
    —Milan Kundera (b. 1929)

    “Society is the stage on which manners are shown; novels are the literature. Novels are the journal or record of manners; and the new importance of these books derives from the fact, that the novelist begins to penetrate the surface, and treat this part of life more worthily.”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    “Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.”
    —George Orwell (1903–1950)