To the list of John Updike s well-intentioned protagonists Rabbit Angstrom, Richard Maple, Henry Bech add James Buchanan, the harried fifteenth president of the United States (1857 1861). In what the author calls a kind of novel, conceived in the form of a play, Buchanan s political and private lives are represented as aspects of his spiritual life, whose crowning, condensing act is the act of dying. This definitive edition includes a Foreword by Updike, discussing early productions of the work, the historical context in which it was written, and its kinship to his later novel "Memories of the Ford Administration." A wide-ranging Afterword fleshes out this dramatic portrait of one of America s lesser known, and least appreciated, leaders."