Anna Hastings

Anna Hastings

US first edition
Author Allen Drury
Country United States
Language English
Series Mark Coffin, U.S.S.
Genre Political novel
Publisher William Morrow
Publication date
 July 1977
Media type Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
Pages 300
ISBN 0-688-03221-4
Followed by Mark Coffin, U.S.S.

Anna Hastings: The Story of a Washington Newspaperperson is a 1977 political novel by Allen Drury which follows the titular reporter as she climbs her way to the top of the Washington media elite. It is set in a different fictional timeline from Drury's 1959 novel Advise and Consent, which earned him a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.[1]

Plot summary

Anna Kowalczek comes to Washington, D.C. to be a news agency copy girl, and soon old Senator Seab Cooley of South Carolina predicts, "Mark my words, that little lady is going to own this town some day." What follows is ambitious Anna's rise from scrappy cub reporter to the Pulitzer Prize-winning founder and leader of the Washington Inquirer, a journey which costs her dearly.

Reception

In 2009, Scott Simon of The Wall Street Journal called Anna Hastings "both an unsparing and sympathetic portrait of a newspaperwoman when they were rare and often maligned."[2] John Barkham wrote in The Victoria Advocate in 1977:

What Drury's Washington novels badly needed was a blue pencil, a less blatant ideology, and greater attention to characterization. In Anna Hastings he delivers all three. This is his most convincing Washington novel since Advise and Consent in 1959. Moreover, he has freed himself of the incubus of his crippling cast of carry-ver fossilized pols from earlier books. Anna Hastings is both a fresh face and a fresh start in Drury fiction.[3]

Though Barkham noted that "Washington is in fact graced by an influential woman newspaper publisher, but she is quite unlike Anna. Drury in fact makes a point of introducing her and her paper into his narrative,"[3] Roger Kaplan called the novel a "transparent attack on the Washington Post" in a 1999 Policy Review article.[4] Kaplan added:

Though [Drury] never lost his talent for spinning a good yarn, drawing amusing, likeable, admirable, and detestable characters in great quantity, he lost his interest in transcending the political moment ... His demolition of the Washington Post and the vices he considered to have seeped into the craft of political journalism in America, Anna Hastings, is incomprehensible to anyone not familiar with the evolution of the American media, and particularly the Washington media, in the past generation.[4]

Kirkus Reviews said of the novel, "Drury still rumbles about forces that bore bungholes in the Ship of State, but even readers on his political wavelength may find the Old Team loyalty too much of a strain on the credulity and Anna too much of a royal pain in the Ascent."[5] In his 2000 book Casanova Was a Book Lover, John Maxwell Hamilton called Anna Hastings "too mean-spirited about what was then budding feminism" and cited Drury's dedication:

Dedicated to all those vigorous, determined, indomitable, and sometimes a wee bit ruthless Bettys, Barbaras, Helens, Nancys, Kays, Marys, Lizes, Deenas, Dorises, Mays, Sarahs, Evelyns, Mariannes, Clares, Frans, Naomis, Miriams, Maxines, Bonnies and the rest, who never cease to amuse, annoy and quite often out scoop their male colleagues of the Washington press corps. They've made it in a tough league—at a certain cost, of course; but they've made it.[6]

Series

Anna Hastings takes place in a separate timeline from the Advise and Consent series, and was followed in 1979 by Mark Coffin, U.S.S., Drury's next modern political novel. Though Hastings does not appear in this novel, she is a minor character in The Hill of Summer (1981) and The Roads of Earth (1984), the two sequels to Mark Coffin, U.S.S..

References

  1. ↑ "Pulitzer Prize Winners: Fiction (1948-present)". Pulitzer.org. Retrieved January 14, 2015.
  2. ↑ Simon, Scott (September 2, 2009). "At 50, a D.C. Novel With Legs". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved January 15, 2015.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Barkham, John (August 7, 1977). "Drury Returns to Washington". The Victoria Advocate. Retrieved January 15, 2015.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Kaplan, Roger (October–November 1999). "Allen Drury and the Washington Novel". Policy Review. Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Retrieved January 16, 2015.
  5. ↑ "Anna Hastings by Allen Drury". Kirkus Reviews. Retrieved January 15, 2015.
  6. ↑ Hamilton, John Maxwell (April 2000). Casanova Was a Book Lover: And Other Naked Truths and Provocative Curiosities About the Writing, Selling, and Reading of Books. LSU Press. p. 103. ISBN 0-807-12554-7.

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