In Hip Figures, Michael Szalay charts a literary history of the Democratic Party. In a review of the book, Evan Kindley fondly looks back on the symbiotic relationship between politics and writerly intellectuals:
"In the decades following the Second World War," [Szalay] writes, "during the heyday of the American novel’s prestige, when it was unclear to the Democrats how they should understand the base of their power or the nature of their interests, it seemed plausible to . . . novelists that they might change the party in significant ways." Evidently, it seemed plausible to the Democrats, too. The Kennedy and Johnson administrations, in particular, flattered and cultivated writers; Gore Vidal stated that 1960 was the year when “politics and literature officially joined forces.”"
William Styron went sailing with JFK and regaled the president with tidbits from his research for The Confessions of Nat Turner. Even writers who weren’t hobnobbing with the political elite felt strongly about their party’s candidates: Ralph Ellison called Johnson "the greatest American President for the poor and for Negroes" and loved his "unreconstructed Texas accent"; and a young Joan Didion “voted, ardently, for Barry Goldwater" and commented decades later, "Had Goldwater remained the same age and continued running, I would have voted for him in every election thereafter." (She later drifted into the Democratic Party, in reaction to the rise of Ronald Reagan, and was much taken with Jesse Jackson in 1988.)
The Dish 