Presidential secret agent Lanny Budd is called back into action in post-war Germany as the Cold War begins
Since the age of thirteen, Lanny Budd has been more than an eyewitness to history. From the Paris Peace Conference to the Battle of the Bulge, he has played key roles in the extraordinary events of his age. Now, forty years later, Presidential Agent 103 is coming out of retirement to serve his country—and the free world—once more.
A counterfeiting conspiracy hatched by unrepentant neo-Nazis threatens to gravely damage America’s efforts to rebuild and stabilize a divided Germany. Lanny’s previous experience, as well as his unexpected connection to one of the chief conspirators, makes him the ideal operative to foil the sinister plot. But when he infiltrates the Russian-controlled sector, what Lanny sees makes his blood run cold. Communist leader and former US ally Joseph Stalin has twisted the socialist ideals he holds dear into weapons of tyranny, oppression, and terror. With the onset of a shadow war between two world superpowers, Lanny realizes that his mission is far from over.
The Return of Lanny Budd is the final volume of Upton Sinclair’s Pulitzer Prize–winning dramatization of twentieth-century world history. A thrilling mix of adventure, romance, and political intrigue, the Lanny Budd Novels are a testament to the breathtaking scope of the author’s vision and his singular talents as a storyteller.
Upton Sinclair (1878–1968) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, activist, and politician whose novel The Jungle (1906) led to the passage of the Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. Born into an impoverished family in Baltimore, Maryland, Sinclair entered City College of New York five days before his fourteenth birthday. He wrote dime novels and articles for pulp magazines to pay for his tuition, and continued his writing career as a graduate student at Columbia University. To research The Jungle, he spent seven weeks working undercover in Chicago’s meatpacking plants. The book received great critical and commercial success, and Sinclair used the proceeds to start a utopian community in New Jersey. In 1915, he moved to California, where he founded the state’s ACLU chapter and became an influential political figure, running for governor as the Democratic nominee in 1934. Sinclair wrote close to one hundred books during his lifetime, including Oil! (1927), the inspiration for the 2007 movie There Will Be Blood; Boston (1928), a documentary novel revolving around the Sacco and Vanzetti case; The Brass Check, a muckraking exposé of American journalism, and the eleven novels in Pulitzer Prize–winning Lanny Budd series.