Vice President Harley Hudson. Reception Saturday Review said of Advise and Consent in August 1959 that "It may be a long time before a better one comes along." Roger Kaplan of Policy Review wrote in 1999 that the novel "in many ways invented a genre in fiction…. The use of a racy intrigue, if possible involving both sex and foreign policy, is what characterizes the contemporary form. Forty years on, Advise and Consent is the only book of this genre that a literary-minded person really ought to read." Richard L. Neuberger reviewed the novel for The New York Times in 1959, writing that "rarely has a political tale been told with such vivid realism" and calling the book "one of the finest and most gripping political novels of our era." Conversely, Pamela Hansford Johnson of the New Statesman called Advise and Consent "politically repellent and artistically null with a steady hysterical undertone." The novel spent 102 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list. In 1960, the Pulitzer Prize committee recommended that the award for fiction be given to Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King, but the board overrode that recommendation and awarded it to Advise and Consent. , it was the last time the Pulitzer for fiction was awarded to the year's bestselling novel. In 2009, Scott Simon wrote in The Wall Street Journal, "Fifty years after its publication and astounding success ... Allen Drury's novel remains the definitive Washington tale." He wrote of Drury that "the conservative Washington novelist was more progressive than Hollywood liberals," noting that the character of Brigham Anderson, the young senator hiding a secret wartime homosexual tryst, is "candid and unapologetic" about his affair, and even calling him "Drury's most appealing character". Assessing Drury's body of work in 1999, Erik Tarloff suggested in The New York Times that "homosexuality does appear to be the only minority status to which Drury seems inclined to accord much sympathy." Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times in 2005: Writing for The Wall Street Journal in 2014, Jonathan Karl called Advise and Consent "the last great novel set in Washington". He called the characters "complicated and multi-dimensional, with principled convictions and plausible personal weaknesses." Advise and Consent had been out of print for almost 15 years and ranked #27 on the 2013 BookFinder.com list of the Top 100 Most Searched for Out of Print Books before