On the eve of World War II, Lanny Budd reenters the deadly snake pit of Nazi Germany as Roosevelt’s spy—in the pulse-pounding, Pulitzer Prize–winning series.
An American art expert raised in a world of European wealth and privilege, Lanny Budd is dedicated to his socialist ideals and to combatting the twin scourges of Nazism and Fascism. In 1937, a chance encounter in New York with Professor Charles Alston—his boss at the Paris Peace Conference and now one of President Roosevelt’s top advisors—provides Lanny with the opportunity to make a profound difference.
Appointed Presidential Agent 103, the international art dealer embarks on a secret assignment that takes him back into the Third Reich as the Allied powers prepare to cede Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler in a futile attempt to avoid war. But Lanny’s motivations are not just political: The woman he loves has fallen into the brutal hands of the Gestapo, and Lanny will risk everything to save her.
Presidential Agent is the action-packed fifth installment of Upton Sinclair’s Pulitzer Prize–winning series that brings the first half of the twentieth century to dramatic life. An astonishing mix of history, adventure, and romance, the Lanny Budd Novels are a testament to the breathtaking scope of the author’s vision and his singular talents as a storyteller.
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“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.”
— New York Times, praise for the series
“Few works of fiction are more fun to read; fewer still make history half as clear, or as human.”
— Time, praise for the series“A great and well-balanced design…I think it the completest and most faithful portrait of that period that has been done or will likely be done.”
— H. G. Wells, praise for the series“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.”
— George Bernard Shaw, praise for the seriesBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Upton Sinclair (1878–1968) was a journalist, a prominent social and political activist, and the author of over one hundred books, including the novel Dragon’s Teeth, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1943. He is perhaps best known for The Jungle, the dramatic exposé of the Chicago meat-packing industry that prompted the investigation by Theodore Roosevelt that culminated in the pure-food legislation of 1906.
Bronson Pinchot, Audible’s Narrator of the Year for 2010, has won Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Awards, AudioFile Earphones Awards, Audible’s Book of the Year Award, and Audie Awards for several audiobooks, including Matterhorn, Wise Blood, Occupied City, and The Learners. A magna cum laude graduate of Yale, he is an Emmy- and People’s Choice-nominated veteran of movies, television, and Broadway and West End shows. His performance of Malvolio in Twelfth Night was named the highlight of the entire two-year Kennedy Center Shakespeare Festival by the Washington Post. He attended the acting programs at Shakespeare & Company and Circle-in-the-Square, logged in well over 200 episodes of television, starred or costarred in a bouquet of films, plays, musicals, and Shakespeare on Broadway and in London, and developed a passion for Greek revival architecture.