Bored with New York society and German philosophy, the young widow Mrs. Lightfoot Lee takes a house in Washington to watch the machinery of American government at work. She is soon drawn toward Senator Silas Ratcliffe, a shrewd party boss with presidential ambitions, while a homespun new President hands out offices to his friends and the capital’s salons trade in influence.
Published anonymously in 1880, Adams’s satire of Gilded Age politics still reads as sharply as any Washington novel since. Download the free EPUB.