With America at war, Lanny Budd risks life and limb from North Africa to Moscow on behalf of the Allied cause Members of the German high command believe that American art expert Lanny Budd is sympathetic to their cause, but since 1938 he has been an undercover agent working for President Franklin Roosevelt. Now, in 1941, the United States has been pulled into the fray by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and Lanny's services are required more than ever. In Algiers he must convince the French troops to stand with the Allies in advance of the Axis invasion. A meeting in Moscow, intended to sway Communist despot Joseph Stalin, precedes Hitler's disastrous decision to invade Russia. Over the course of the next two years, Lanny faces death at virtually every turn as his important presidential missions carry him from the sands of the African desert to the bomb-blasted streets of Berlin. Presidential Mission is the electrifying eighth chapter of Upton Sinclair's Pulitzer Prize–winning dramatization of twentieth-century world history. An astonishing mix of adventure, romance, and political intrigue, the Lanny Budd Novels are a testament to the breathtaking scope of the author's vision and his singular talents as a storyteller.
"Few works of fiction are more fun to read; fewer still make history half as clear, or as human."
Time
"When people ask me what has happened in my long lifetime, I do not refer them to the newspaper files and to the authorities, but to [Upton Sinclair's] novels."
Time
"These historical novels engulfed me in the thrilling and terrible imperatives of history. . . . Sinclair's historical acumen and his calculations about powerful institutions-government, press, corporations, oil cartels and lobbyists-remain remarkably shrewd and often prescient."
