The advantages of the novelist’s method over the political scientist’s compensate for the drawbacks. These advantages do not necessarily produce a better work, one which gives more insight into a problem or explains it better. They do, however, offer more latitude and fewer restrictions. The novelist may use all the techniques of the political scientist. Sinclair’s Boston is studded with as many references to actual events, people, and documents as most scientific studies, although it is permeated by a violent partisanship which would make a scholarly study highly suspect. But this points up one of the novelist’s advantages: he can use the methods of scholarship to document his case and then supplement them with heroes and villains who add an emotional appeal to the intellectual one. This string to the novelist’s bow is a strong one. He can create a character like Shaw’s Clement Archer in _The Troubled Air_, while the scientist is forced to use opinion research, carefully documented sources, and well-verified trends in treating the problem of deprivation of livelihood as a penalty for suspected political unreliability. Sometimes the scientist uses case histories, but the subjects are often identified by initials and treated with such antiseptic objectivity that almost no emotional impact comes through. The loss of Clement Archer’s job, because he has employed actors blacklisted for suspected Communist activity by a newsletter acting as a self-appointed judge, presents this general problem with more frightening immediacy and reader-involvement than an excellent scholarly study could ever do. Archer becomes one embodiment of the problem--a rather naïve but courageous liberal made into a sacrificial goat because of his fight for what he believes to be traditional and critical American rights. If he wants to, the novelist can use historical personages to flesh out his story. Although the reader does not see him in its pages, Dos Passos’ _The Grand Design_ uses the figure of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the background as one of the mainsprings of the action. An individual may appear in transparent fictional guise. The _roman à clef_ has many representatives in the political novel. Pyotr Verhovensky in Dostoyevsky’s _The Possessed_ has been identified as the revolutionary Sergei Nechaev. Hamer Shawcross in Howard Spring’s _Fame Is the Spur_ is thought to be Ramsay MacDonald. The governor-dictators who rampage through Dos Passos’ _Number One_, Adria Langley’s _A Lion Is in the Streets_, and Robert Penn Warren’s _All the King’s Men_ look and act much like Huey Long. The novelist ranges backward into time as does the scientist. Maugham’s _Then and Now_ brings to life the wily Niccolo Machiavelli, and Samuel Shellabarger’s _Prince of Foxes_ reexamines the sinister Cesare Borgia. When the novelist goes forward into time he need not be confined to a mathematical extrapolation of birth rates, trade balances, or electoral trends.