Allen Drury
| Allen Stuart Drury | |
|---|---|
Ronald Reagan visits with Drury in 1981
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| Born |
September 2, 1918 Houston, Texas, United States |
| Died | September 2, 1998 (aged 80) San Francisco, California |
| Residence | Tiburon, California |
| Nationality | American |
| Citizenship | American |
| Education | Bachelor of Arts |
| Alma mater | Stanford University |
| Occupation | Journalist, novelist |
| Years active | 1943-1998 |
| Employer |
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| Known for | Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and 20 novels |
| Home town | Porterville, California |
| Spouse(s) | Never married |
| Parent(s) | Alden Monteith Drury Flora Allen |
| Relatives |
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Allen Stuart Drury (September 2, 1918 – September 2, 1998) was an American novelist. He wrote the 1959 novel Advise and Consent, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1960.
Drury was born on September 2, 1918 in Houston, Texas, to Alden Monteith Drury (1895-1975), a citrus industry manager, real estate broker, and insurance agent, and Flora Allen (1894-1973), a legislative representative for the California Parent-Teacher Association. The family moved to Whittier, California, where Alden and Flora had a daughter, Anne Elizabeth (1924-1998.) Drury was a direct descendant of Hugh Drury (1616-1689) and Lydia Rice (1627-1675), daughter of Edmund Rice (1594-1663), all of whom were early immigrants to Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Allen Stuart Drury grew up in Porterville, California and earned his B.A. at Stanford University, where he joined Alpha Kappa Lambda, in 1939. He told Writer's Yearbook that he was "associate editor, wrote a column, and editorials." His last series of novels, written shortly before he died, were inspired by his experiences at Stanford. After graduating from Stanford, Drury went to work for the Tulare Bee in Porterville in 1940, where he won the Sigma Delta Chi Award for editorial writing from the Society of Professional Journalists. He then moved to Bakersfield and wrote for the Bakersfield Californian, where he "handled what they called county news." Drury enlisted in the U.S. Army on July 25, 1942 in Los Angeles and trained as an infantry soldier, but was discharged "because of an old back injury."
In 1943, Drury moved to Washington. "I went East and wound up in Washington, which fascinated me, and I thought I would get a job for about a year for experience before coming back to the coast. I came back twenty years later, finally."
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Wikipedia