A Flag Full of Stars by Don Robertson (1964, Hardcover)

A Flag Full of Stars
by Don Robertson
Publisher:  G. P. Putnam's Sons
Copyright 1964
Book Club Edition

Each of the leading characters in this long, powerful Prize novel has his own separate story . . . his own compelling drama.  They are tied together by one factor only.  The time factor.

A Flag Full of Stars opens at 11:28 p.m. on November 1st, 1948.  It concludes at 11:46 a.m. November 3rd.  During those thirty-six hours the voters of America revoked the "summer and autumn elections" by the pollsters and the experts, who had predicted an overwhelming landslide for the Republican Presidential candidate, Thomas E. Dewey.

Each of the individual dramas in A Flag Full of Stars is bound in with this election; each sweeps to its own stirring climax as the decisive returns pour in.

There is, for example, Hugo G. Underwood, lawyer, from Columbus, Ohio.  He is wealthy -- inherited wealth.  He has a wife, Jane, four children -- and a mistress, Shirley Edwards, who has recently obtained her MA from Ohio State.  And she has been offered an instructorship at Marietta College.  In fact, it was on her way back from Marietta that her car broke down.  And a man driving by got out to see whether he could help.  This was Hugo,  That was how they met.  Their affair started that night.  Within a week it was a genuine love affair.  Shirley offered Hugo something he had never known during his seventeen-year marriage -- warmth, tenderness, understanding.  There was no mystery as to why he should love her.  As to why she should love him was not only a mystery -- it seemed to Hugo a miracle.  Yet, love him she did.  She turned down the job at Marietta to remain in Columbus -- to be with him, even though she had known from the start that he could not break up his family; that an affair was all it could ever be.

Jane Underwood knew about Shirley.  And she had devised -- she thought -- a brilliant way to punish her husband by humiliating him publicly.  She had persuaded him to run for Congress on the Democratic ticket in a strongly Republican district.  When he came crawling back to her in defeat, she would give him balm and sympathy, magnanimously forgive him for his trespasses, and thus bind him to her totally and forever.

But Hugo Underwood was swept into office (along with numerous other "political underdogs" on the Democratic ticket).  And on November 3rd -- having passed the greatest crisis in his public life, Hugo found himself faced with the greatest crisis in his private life -- a crisis which is dramatically resolved at 10:17 a.m. by a single and totally unexpected call . . . .

There is the story of Delores Free -- nee Dolly Feinstein.  She was -- thanks to will-power, luck, a modicum of talent and a maximum of bosom -- one of Hollywood's most important stars.  She was not only world-famed and a millionairess in her own right but she possessed as well the considerable accrued wealth of her two famous -- and deceased -- husbands.  She was regarded consequently as a woman who "had everything."  Yet, she was tormented by the fact that the man who meant more to her than anyone else in the world was deteriorating as a person.  Using her considerable influence, she tried to "bribe" a job for him.  Yet, she knew he could not hold it unless he underwent a disastrous change within himself.  Then, incredibly, unexpectedly the Truman election pointed the way!

Each of the separate stories in this long and always absorbing book probes deeply, frankly, with compelling realism into the private lives of a fascinating group of Americans -- who had only one thing in common:  their close and very personal involvement with the outcome of the national election.

A Flag Full of Stars won the distinction of being designated a Putnam $10,000 Award Novel.  A tremendously vital and engrossing book which rises to not one -- but over a dozen -- separate electrifying climaxes.

Condition:  Used.  Hardcover.  No dust cover.  Pages are tanned and darkening from age.  Previous owner's name and date are written on the front endpaper.  There's a book club flyer tucked in the front cover.

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