Anna Hastings

Anna Hastings: The Story of a Washington Newspaperperson is a 1977 political novel by Allen Drury which follows the titular reporter as she climbs her way to the top of the Washington media elite. It is set in a different fictional timeline from Drury's 1959 novel Advise and Consent, which earned him a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Plot summary Anna Kowalczek arrived on Capitol Hill the very day America entered World War II. She infiltrated the exclusively male domains of politics and journalism by hiding her intelligence and drive behind a façade of cheerful, irreverent innocence—playing the role men expected of bright, pretty girls in 1941. Thirty-five years later, Anna Hastings, widow of Texas Senator Gordon Hastings, is an influential columnist, powerful television personality, major political figure, publisher of one of the most respected newspapers in the country, and master of a media empire she ruled with a whim of iron. Anna Hastings is the story of her public and personal struggles as she climbs her way from obscurity to legend, set against the backdrop of Washington during the tumultuous years of World War, Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, and the emergence of feminism as a distinct political force. Drawing on his years reporting on the Senate, Allen Drury again presents an "insider's view" of both the Senate and the Washington Press Corps during these decades of rapid social and political change. Reception In 2009, The Wall Street Journal published a retrospective by National Public Radio commentator Scott Simon in which he called Anna Hastings "both an unsparing and sympathetic portrait of a newspaperwoman when they were rare and often maligned." John Barkham wrote in The Victoria Advocate in 1977: