In _Presidential Agent_ (1945), as in the rest of the voluminous Lanny Budd series, Upton Sinclair mixed imaginary characters with real ones, and fictitious events with those from last year’s newspapers. In this novel (for which any other of the series might be substituted for the present purpose), Lanny moves among the great ones of the world as their intimate and confidant. As Presidential Agent 103 with the code name Zaharoff, he sends his reports directly to President Roosevelt. Using his entree as an art expert, he further ingratiates himself into the confidence of the leading Nazis by becoming Hitler’s _Kunstsachverständiger_. In this role he goes to Austria ostensibly to purchase paintings for Hitler but actually to gauge Austria’s mood and its ripeness for _anschluss_ with Germany. The incredible Lanny breaks into an SS dungeon, Indian-wrestles with Rudolph Hess, and briefs everyone about everyone else, from Lord Runciman to Kurt Schuschnigg. He also finds time to outline Roosevelt’s Chicago “quarantine” speech. All is revealed to him, from the Cagoulard conspiracy in France to the temper of the Cliveden set in England. The pages of this long novel are jammed with events and people who made news on three continents immediately before and after Munich. A journalistic, omniscient book, _Presidential Agent_ is loaded with slang, clichés, and gauche conversation and narration. But it is an outstanding example of the novel which records current political history. Dos Passos’s _Grand Design_ pulls together the threads of several current themes. In this one book, the reader finds a continuation of earlier material about Communism in America, the rising labor movement, and new liberalism in government. The transition is then made to World War II, America’s world responsibilities, growing recognition of the Communist threat, and American obligations in the post-war world. The novel’s characters work out their individual destinies against a background of New Deal reforms and international events leading to war. But there is no arbitrary interlarding of the two. Dos Passos ably manipulates these two types of material. He weaves them together into one fabric so that they combine into a meaningful pattern which sets off individual action against group action. The NRA, the WPB, the fall of the Low Countries, the agitation for a second front--all of them are there. But in this artistic fusion the lives of Millard Carroll, Paul Graves, and Georgia Washburn remain individual, retaining their identity and meaning. =Post-War Directions=