Buchanan Books in Order

This is really a one-book sequence, and that makes it a little unusual on an author page full of longer runs and recurring characters.

Buchanan Dying is a historical play centered on James Buchanan, the fifteenth president of the United States, in the last stretch of his life in 1868. Updike imagines Buchanan sick in bed, looking back over the choices, loyalties, evasions, and private longings that shaped both his career and his public ruin. If you come to this page expecting a fast-moving historical adventure, that is not quite the experience. The energy here is inward. The drama comes from memory, self-justification, accusation, and the slow pressure of history closing in.

The setting matters. Buchanan is not on the campaign trail or at the center of cabinet intrigue. He is dying, and the country he once led has already gone through civil war. That distance lets Updike do two things at once. He can show the old politician in intimate, almost domestic scenes with attendants and visitors, and he can keep the larger national verdict hanging over every exchange. The play keeps asking how a person explains himself when the record outside the sickroom has hardened against him.

It is also one of Updike's most openly Pennsylvania books, though it reaches back into nineteenth-century politics rather than twentieth-century suburbia. Buchanan's regional identity, his bachelor solitude, and his inability to master events all matter here. Updike is interested in how a public man can seem formal, stubborn, even dry on the surface and still carry a storm of regret underneath.

There is no detective puzzle to solve. The tension comes from whether Buchanan can see himself clearly, and whether anyone around him will let him.

Because it is a play, the writing tends to move by speech, confrontation, and staged recollection rather than dense narration. That gives the book a different feel from the Rabbit novels or the Maples stories. It is leaner, more theatrical, and more openly concerned with reputation. You are listening to a man argue with time.

If this page makes the Buchanan entry look like a tiny side road in Updike's career, that is fair. It is not one of his big popular worlds. But it is an interesting one if you like historical fiction with a reflective, talk-heavy bent, or if you are curious about how Updike handled politics, aging, and American guilt when he stepped away from his usual modern settings. Think of it as a compact historical chamber piece, serious, intimate, and haunted by the knowledge that the country has already passed judgment.