The Speechwriter brings you inside the spin room of the modern politician in "a wry and eloquent memoir" (The Wall Street Journal) that is "the best book about politics I've read in years" (GQ) and "will become a classic" (The Washington Post). Everyone knows this kind of politician: a charismatic maverick who goes up against the system and its ways, but thinks he doesn't have to live by the rules. Through his own experience as a speechwriter for a controversial governor, Barton Swaim tells the story of a band of believers who attach themselves to this sort of ambitious narcissist-and what happens when it all comes crashing down. As The Washington Post put it, "The Speechwriter feels like Veep meets All the King's Men-an entertaining and engrossing book not just about the absurdities of working in the press shop of a Southern governor but also about the meaning of words in public life." Swaim paints a portrait of a boss so principled he'd rather sweat than use state money to pay for air conditioning, so oblivious he'd wear the same stained shirt for two weeks, so egotistical he'd belittle his staffers to make himself feel better, and so self-absorbed he never once apologized to his staff for making his administration the laughingstock of the country. On the surface, this is the story of one politician's rise and fall. But in the end, it's a story about us-the very real people who want to believe in our leaders and must learn to survive with broken hearts. The Speechwriter is "a wryly funny, beautifully written...dissection of what it is like to perform a thankless job for an unreasonable person in a dysfunctional office...A marvelously entertaining book. It's clear [Swaim] spent a long time on it, because he's made it look so effortless" (The New York Times).

By examining the ways in which the conservative vision of the world informs certain modes of literary study and has been treated in various works of literature throughout the ages, this book seeks to recover conservatism as a viable, rigorous, intellectually sound method of critical inquiry. While it stops short of promoting political conservatism as an antidote to the dominant progressive strain of today's university, it recognizes literature's transformative power as an artistic reflection of the universal human condition. In this way, it operates against the grain of today's prevailing approaches to literature, particularly the postmodernist wave that has employed literature as a recorder of injustice rather than as evidence of artistic achievement. Therefore, the agenda is restorative, if not revolutionary, returning literature to its place as the center of a true liberal arts curriculum, one that celebrates human freedom, the unimpeded pursuit of truth, and the preservation of civilized life. Perhaps this book's greatest service is that it seeks to define conservatism in highly distinct contexts. Its authors collectively reveal that the conservative ideal lacks formulaic expression, and is thus more richly complex than it is often credited for. Conservatism is not easily defined, and by presenting such divergent expressions of it, the essays here belie the reductive generalizations so common throughout the academy. Ultimately, the conservative ideal may have much more in common with the stated goals of higher learning than has previously been acknowledged. Thus, while this book in no way seeks to directly apply conservatism to curricular matters, it does revive a competing vision of how knowledge is transmitted through art and history, while also affirming the ways in which literature functions as a forum for ideas.

The essays in this collection all treat in some way the conservative's vision of society as it is variously manifested in literary art, its scholarship, and its transmission through classical modes of liberal learning. Responding in part to the postmodernist turn in literary study, Literature and the Conservative Ideal examines the ways in which conservatism has been depicted in literature, as well as how its tendencies might restore literature's potential as an artistic reflection of the universal human condition.