References in Popular Culture
- The cathedral is the setting of Margaret Truman's novel Murder at the National Cathedral.
- It is the location of Mrs. Landingham's funeral and President Bartlet's resulting tirade against God in the second season finale of The West Wing, "Two Cathedrals".
- The cathedral close, the area in and around the cathedral, is alluded to often, but rather vaguely, in the movie Along Came a Spider.
- Tom Clancy's novel Executive Orders includes a memorial service for the late president Rodger Durling, his wife, most of the United States Congress, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Supreme Court that takes place at this location. In an infamous scene, a soldier bearing the president's casket slips on some ice on the front steps and suffers crushed legs.
- In Elizabeth Hand's novel Winterlong, it appears as the "Engulfed Cathedral".
- It is a setting in Dan Brown's 2009 novel The Lost Symbol.
- It served as an architectural inspiration for Keep Venture in Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn series
- It is the setting for the burial of fictional Supreme Court Justice Abraham Rosenberg in the movie The Pelican Brief, based on a John Grisham book of the same name.
Read more about this topic: Washington National Cathedral
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed spinach for her, with lots of butter.... I was impressed by Shirley Temple as a little girl my age who had power: she could write a piece for the newspapers and have it printed in her own handwriting.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“What’s wrong, a little pavement sickness?”
—Russian saying popular in the Soviet period, trans. by Vladimir Ivanovich Shlyakov (1993)
“Children became an obsessive theme in Victorian culture at the same time that they were being exploited as never before. As the horrors of life multiplied for some children, the image of childhood was increasingly exalted. Children became the last symbols of purity in a world which was seen as increasingly ugly.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)