Dewey Defeats Truman

A masterful retelling of a legend and famous headline of modern American history—Harry Truman’s upset victory over Thomas E. Dewey in the 1948 presidential election.

Set in Dewey’s hometown of Owosso, Michigan, this is the captivating story of a local love triangle that mirrors the national election contest. As the voters must decide between the candidates, so must Anne Macmurray choose between two suitors: an ardent United Auto Workers organizer and his polar opposite, a wealthy young Republican lawyer who’s running for the state senate. Weaving a tapestry of small-town secrets, the people of Owosso ready themselves for the fame that is bound to shower down upon them after Dewey’s “sure thing” victory. But as the novel—and history—move toward election night, we watch the townspeople, along with Anne and her suitors, have their fates rearranged in a climax filled with suspense, chagrin and unexpected joy.

“A warm, touching, and richly textured novel; a classic American movie filmed in glorious prose deluxe.” —Entertainment Weekly

“A finely textured web. . . . Like Shakespeare’s summery comedies, the novel is about love’s madness. . . . Effortlessly summons the feel of a bygone era. . . . A lovely meditation on the interplay between past and present.” —Jay Parini, The New York Times Book Review

“Charming . . . Mallon is a master of detail about a place and a time.” —Chicago Tribune

“A beautifully written and absorbing novel, with richly drawn characters and a wealth of bubbling plots.” —Detroit Free Press

“It’s fueled by a sense of period detail so strong that reading it seems at times like paging through an old high school yearbook . . . I enjoyed the wit and precision with which Mallon presents this world.” —Boston Sunday Globe

“Thomas Mallon is a smart, inventive, prolific writer . . . What interests him is not history per se but the way in which large events touch and alter the lives of ordinary, unknown people.” —The Washington Post

“Mallon’s prose is always rich and economical. . . . Dewey Defeats Truman is the kind of novel that restores meaning to the present by recovering the past.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“[A] beautifully controlled novel. . . . Mallon has so meticulously re-created a time and place that even trivial data has the force of nothing less than truth. . . . Mallon’s complicated meditation on the trials of private and public identity is beautifully fashioned. Its tale of yesteryear tells America a little bit about what it is today.” —Publishers Weekly