Elvis and Nixon
A Novel
A darkly comic, fictional trip through 1970s Americana with Richard Nixon and Elvis Presley riding shotgun.
On December 21st, 1970 a drug-addled Elvis Presley showed up unannounced at the entrance gate of the White House with a handwritten request to meet with President Nixon. Elvis lamented the Beatles as a “real force for anti-American spirit” and assured the commander-in-chief, “I’m on your side.” With aides watching and flashbulbs popping, Nixon presented Elvis with an FBI Special Narcotics Agent badge; an ecstatic Elvis put his arms around the President, pulling him in for a spontaneous embrace. It was a surreal – yet undeniably real – moment in history. But the stranger-than-fiction story doesn't end, or begin, there…
Against the backdrop of that…
Jonathan Lowy is the author of the novels The Temple of Music and Elvis and Nixon. Elvis and Nixon won the Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook Award for Distinguished First Novel Published in the United States in 2001, as well as the 2001 Towson University Prize for Literature. A graduate of Harvard College and the University of Virginia School of Law, he lives in Maryland with his wife and two children.
Elvis and Nixon
Jonathan Lowy