A President is Born by Fannie Hurst
A President Is Born opens on the Schuyler family's rural holdings around Centralia, centering on David ("Davey") Schuyler, the youngest of seven children born late into his parents' lives. As a small boy David plays alone among the cornfield tepees, absorbs the sensory world of the farm, and forms deep attachments — especially to his hound dog Teddy and to his forceful, land-driven sister Rebekka ("Bek"), who runs the High Ridge farm with an efficiency and strength that overshadow her genial, artistic, indolent husband Winslow. The extended clan is drawn in careful contrast: the domineering, sentimental Old Gentleman patriarch and his anxious immigrant wife Mathilda; scholarly, reluctant Henry, courted for years by the patient schoolteacher Henriette Simpson yet unable to marry her or accept the political office the party keeps offering him; blustering, status-hungry Phil; soft, conventional Emma and her pampered daughter Claire; and Rebekka's own children — Paula away teaching, the mentally arrested but gently poeticized Leslie, and Stevey, secretly battling alcoholism. The narrative's central dramatic thread is Rebekka's private struggle to shield the family's reputation and Stevey's illness simultaneously: she withdraws him from agricultural college after a dean's letter reveals repeated drunkenness, conceals the truth from her fragile husband, and discovers that Stevey and his cousin Claire have fallen in love — a forbidden entanglement compounding the family's secret shame. Interwoven through these adult crises is David's own small odyssey: a nighttime barefoot trek across the fields to tend a sick ewe-lamb, torn between duty to the lamb and to Bek. The section closes on a pivotal, violent scene — a drunken Stevey brutally kicks Teddy, David's dog, in a fit of intoxicated defiance, an act witnessed by David that shatters the family's carefully maintained façade before him and forces Rebekka into direct confrontation with her son's addiction and his forbidden love. Throughout, the narrative voice shifts between close childhood perception and italicized retrospective passages — David's own later reminiscences as a grown, apparently historically significant public figure (the title's "president"), lending the domestic, small-town material an undertone of destiny and foreshadowed greatness.
By Fannie Hurst · First published 1928 · Genre: fiction, american literature, literary fiction · 4 chapters · 154,348 words
First lines
There was a game that David loved.[1]
He called it Indian in the Corn.
What this Textopian page supports
A President is Born is listed on Textopian as a novel by Fannie Hurst, dated 1928 CE.
This source record anchors work identity, reading entry points, and catalog context for checking claims about the work.
- Work type: Novel
- Author: Fannie Hurst
- Date: 1928 CE
- Language: English
- Genres: fiction, american literature, literary fiction, novel, domestic fiction
- Length: 154,348 words
- Structure: 4 chapters, 3,646 paragraphs
- Reading fit: Fairly Easy (7th Grade)
Good citation fit
- Work identity for A President is Born by Fannie Hurst
- Canonical title URL and first readable passage URL
- Genre and topic classification from the Textopian catalog
- Readability and classroom-planning context
- Passage-specific claims should cite the exact /read/ URL for the relevant chapter or paragraph
Genres
- fiction — An invented narrative following Bek from a Midwestern farming boyhood toward national prominence.
- american literature — Thoroughly American in setting, idiom and preoccupation, from the farm household to national politics.
- literary fiction — Character-driven and stylistically attentive, carried largely through closely observed dialogue.
- novel — A single sustained long-form prose narrative.
Tags
politics · ambition · leadership · American politics · historical fiction · political fiction · social commentary · character study · power · destiny · success · drama