The Red White and Blue

“Crackling dialogue, gritty characters, a fierce, unblinking stare at acts of brutality.”—Anne Tyler, The New York Times Book Review.


A brilliantly panoramic novel spanning a quarter-century of American life, John Gregory Dunne’s The Red White and Blue tells the story of California's high-profile Broderick family, a tale beginning in the tumult of the 1960s. The clan includes a billionaire San Francisco patriarch, his sons the celebrity priest and Hollywood screenwriter, and his daughter, wife to the brother of the American president. Rounding out the front-line cast is Leah Kaye, a politically radical lawyer once married to the screenwriter Jack Broderick, an ex-newspaperman and the book's narrator.


The influence of wealth in American politics. A California agricultural strike. A South American election. The black-power movement. Hollywood movers and shakers. All of this and more is deftly navigated as Dunne sets his main characters and big-canvas forces in motion. Jack himself is pulled into the swirl,  his ironic detachment proving insufficient bulwark against dramas that grow darker, more dangerous and more personal as Dunne’s epic unfolds.


A robust, bitterly comic portrait of America in the Viet Nam era and after, with a storyline headed towards tragedy, The Red White and Blue — appearing here in digital format for the first time — is John Gregory Dunne at his most ambitious and far-seeing, his gaze sweeping from coast to coast and from decade to American decade.