Literary Interventions in the Campaign Biography

"In this well-written and insightful book, Michael Blouin challenges our understanding of American politics, culture, and literature. He also persuades readers to pay better attention to books that have largely been ignored by literary critics. But rather than simply explain what we’ve been missing, Blouin explores how that strangely American genre, the campaign biography, can provoke important questions about authorship and aesthetics."

-- Carl Sederholm, Editor, The Journal of American Culture

"Rather than dickering around with dubious forms of cultural politics, Michael Blouin trains his critical artillery directly at the belly of the beast: US presidential politics. Reading campaign biographies produced between 1820 and 1920 by distinguished literati like Washington Irving, Nathanael Hawthorne, and William Dean Howells in the context of their better-known fictions, Blouin offers new ways of understanding the movement from Romanticism to realism: 'the "realer-than-thou" propulsion of American letters,' in his words. His work also models new ways of understanding the relation between literary and popular fiction. The final chapter, on the recent proliferation of candidate autobiographies by the Bushes, Obama, Sanders, and Hillary Clinton, is a corker. Blouin’s book is consistently engaging, theoretically sophisticated, and well argued."

-- David Stowe, Professor in Religious Studies, Michigan State University