Allen Drury was born in Houston, Texas, in 1918 and graduated from Stanford University. He began as a reporter and covered the U.S. Senate during and after World War II.
His first novel, Advise and Consent (1959), won the 1960 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was followed by several sequels, including A Shade of Difference (1962) and Preserve and Protect (1968). He died in San Francisco in 1998.