kept a journal in which he recorded the events of Congress as well as his impressions and views of individual senators and the Senate itself. Drury's journal followed the career of Harry S. Truman from junior senator to President of the United States, and also covered "President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his contentious relations with the Senate." The journal was published in 1963 as A Senate Journal 1943–45 after Drury had experienced great success with his 1959 novel Advise and Consent. After leaving United Press, he free-lanced for a year, writing a column for local papers in the West. "This venture lasted about a year and did not succeed, as it does not for many people." He then moved to Pathfinder Magazine, a general news magazine. From there, he moved to the Washington Evening Star, where he gained a reputation for the quality of his writing. Various pieces from this period were collected in a volume entitled Three Kids in a Cart. Advise and Consent and later works In 1954 James Reston, the Washington bureau chief of The New York Times, hired Drury. Russell Baker, hired at about the same time, recalled the circumstances in a remembrance published after Drury's death: In his spare time, Drury wrote the novel which would become 1959's Advise and Consent. Drury later wrote a memorandum for his archives at the Hoover Institution in which he gives a full account of how the book came to be written and published. Baker was one of the first people to read the manuscript and describes his initial reluctance and then reaction: The novel uses several incidents from Drury's fifteen years in Washington as pegs for the story, about a controversial nominee for Secretary of State. Addressing the suggestion that the book was a roman à clef, Drury wrote a very sharply worded preface which was only published in the new edition: The novel spent 102 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1960. It was adapted into a well-received Broadway play by Loring Mandel, who is known for a highly successful career writing for television. Otto Preminger directed an acclaimed 1962 film starring Henry Fonda. In 2009, Scott Simon of NPR wrote in The Wall Street Journal, "Fifty years after its publication and astounding success ... Allen Drury's novel remains the definitive Washington tale." When it was