Download or read book Authoritarianism and Class in American Political Fiction written by David Smit and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-05-31 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes what many critics consider to be the three best examples of modern American political fiction—Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah, and Billy Lee Brammer’s The Gay Place—to address a specific problem in American governance: how the intense competition for power among elite factions often results in their ignoring major groups of their constituents, thereby providing political bosses with a rationale to seize authoritarian control of the government in the name of constituent groups who feel ignored or neglected, promising them more democratic rule, but in the process, excluding other groups, so that the bosses themselves become elitist, ruling only for the sake of some constituents and not others.