Presidents of American Fiction

Michael J. Blouin is Associate Professor of English and the Humanities at Milligan University, USA, where he co-founded and now directs the Honors Program. He serves as chair for Literature, Politics, and Society for the Popular Culture Association (PCA/ACA), and is the author of Stephen King and American Politics (2021) and Mass-Market Fiction and the Crisis of American Liberalism, 1972 – 2017 (2018).

Michael Blouin has written a truly remarkable, and remarkably important, study of the American presidency here, treating major representations of the chief executive in works of fiction over nearly two centuries but looking beyond these visions as well. He takes into account the notion of 'presidentialism' itself, inviting us to see the office itself as a kind of necessary fiction, one that functions oddly in a supposedly democratic nation. Blouin's book is, I think, a hugely interesting and important contribution to the aesthetics of politics, and it sheds light on how we live our corporate lives – not something one often sees in an academic study. This book deserves a wide and appreciative audience.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Moving Portraits of the President 1. James Fenimore Cooper's Exceptional Presidents2. George Lippard and the Gothic President3. Williams Wells Brown and the Disembodied President4. The President in Books for Boys5. The President in Books for Girls6. Hamlin Garland, Ulysses S. Grant, and the Tortured Heart of American Realism7. Gore Vidal and the Performative Presidency8. The Imperial Presidents of American LiteratureEpilogue: George Saunders and Presidential Melancholia ReferencesIndex