From time to time in the Doubleday Short Studies in Political Science series, guest analysts from outside the formal boundaries of the discipline will be invited to help fill certain gaps in existing materials. In the present instance a young professional student of literature, Dr. Joseph Blotner, has contributed a much-needed and highly useful introduction to the political novel. Thanks largely to the care and skill with which this analysis has been prepared, students of English and political science, as well as general readers, should find new and stimulating pathways open to them. So far as the editor and author know, this is the first essay of its kind in the English language. The fact is worth noting because, despite the large number of political novels in all languages and despite the obvious importance of this particular species of the novel generally, scholars in the field of literature have not devoted systematic attention to it. Until Dr. Blotner decided to undertake a full-scale investigation of the political novel--of which the present essay is one of the beginning steps--the teacher of political science could search the modern language journals and literary periodicals in vain for help in canvassing the possibly valuable contributions of the novelist in describing and explaining political behavior. _The Political Novel_ is to be welcomed on still other grounds. It is interdisciplinary in scope and intent and it demonstrates anew the fruitful results which can be achieved when a scholar merges his technical competence in one branch of learning with his informed and enthusiastic interest in another. Moreover, crude and scattered though the bridges between pairs of the social sciences (e.g., political psychology) are, the bridges between the social sciences and the humanities are even more so. Collaboration--in this case between literature and political science--should certainly take more than one form, but whatever the form, the great need is to light up the shadowy twilight zones which lie between major disciplines. Not only are these unexplored areas of subject matter to be charted, there are common purposes and joint efforts to be considered. Among others, Dr. Blotner has raised the question: what can the experts in literature and in politics give to each other?