A political satire that reimagines George Wallace’s last run for governor of Alabama
It’s the summer of George Wallace’s last run for governor of Alabama in 1982, and the state is at a crossroads. In Katherine Clark’s All the Governor’s Men, a political comedy of manners that reimagines Wallace’s last campaign, voters face a clear choice between the infamous segregationist, now a crippled old man in a wheelchair, and his primary opponent, Aaron Osgood, a progressive young candidate poised to liberate the state from its George Wallace-poisoned past.
Daniel Dobbs, a twenty one-year-old Harvard graduate and South Alabama native, is one of many young people who have joined the campaign representing hope and change for a downtrodden Alabama. A political animal himself, Daniel possesses so much charm and charisma that he was nicknamed ’the Governor’ in college. Nowhe is engaged in the struggle to conquer once and for all the malignant man Alabamians have traditionally called ’the Governor.’
This historic election isn’t the only thing Daniel wants to win. During his senior year, he fell in love with a freshman girl from Mountain Brook, the ’Tiny Kingdom’ of wealth and privilege, a world apart from his own Alabama origins. A small-town country boy, Daniel desperately wants to gain the favor of his girlfriend’s family along with her mentor, the larger-than-life English teacher Norman Laney. Daniel also wants to keep one or two ex-girlfriends firmly out of the picture. In the course of his summer, he must untangle his complicated personal life, satisfy the middle-class dreams of his parents for their Harvard-educated son, decide whether to enter law school or launch his own political career, and, incidentally, help his candidate defeat George Wallace, in a close and increasingly dirty race.
All the Governor’s Men is a darkly comic look at both the political process in general and a significant political chapter in Alabama history. This second novel in Katherine Clark’s Mountain Brook series depicts the social and political landscape of an Alabama world that is at once a place like no other and at the same time, a place like all others.
Om författaren
Katherine Clark is the co-author of the oral biographies Motherwit: An Alabama Midwife’s Story, with Onnie Lee Logan, and Milking the Moon: A Southerner’s Story of Life on This Planet (a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle award), with Eugene Walter. Her debut novel, The Headmaster’s Darlings, won the 2015 Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction, part of her Mountain Brook series, along with All the Governor’s Men, The Harvard Bride, and The Ex-Suicide. All four novels were published by the University of South Carolina Press’s Story River Books imprint, whose founding editor was Pat Conroy. Clark holds an A.B. degree in English from Harvard and a Ph.D. in English from Emory.
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