I have seen and enjoyed the movie starring Spencer Tracy a number of times before I read this book. Spencer Tracy was an excellent Frank Skeffington. I enjoyed the book though there were times when it moved a bit too slowly for me. In a sense, seeing the movie before reading the book may have taken something away from my enjoyment as I was able to anticipate the arc of the story and the ending.

Frank Skeffington is the mayor of a city (obviously Boston) who is running for re-election. He eschews using media in favor of personal politics with campaign stops at neighborhoods, funeral services and work places. He is surrounded buy an eclectic group of friends, allies and sycophants, who depend upon him for jobs and their business.

Depending on your point of view, one can view Frank Skeffington as a sympathetic man worthy of praise and emulation or a crass politician from the “big boss” era taking advantage of the taxpayers and constituents.

A very good story on big city politics whose time has come and gone… ( )

654. The Last Hurrah, by Edwin O'Connor (read 28 May 1961) This is one of the author's most famous novels and I believe I enjoyed reading it. ( )

The Last Hurrah, published in the mid-nineteen fifties, was Edwin O'Connor's first success and his most popular novel. The plot of The Last Hurrah focuses on a mayoral election in an unnamed East Coast city. Veteran Irish, Democratic Party politician Frank Skeffington is running for yet another term as Mayor. As a former governor, he is usually called by the honorific title "Governor." While the city is never named, it is frequently assumed to be Boston. As a result of this novel, he was forever associated with Irish Boston—although he never did quite admit in interviews that he had used Boston’s greatest rascal, the often-elected mayor James Michael Curley, as the model for Skeffington. The story is told in the third person, either by a narrator or by Adam Caulfield, the Mayor's nephew. Skeffington is a veteran and adept "machine" politician, and probably corrupt as well. The novel portrays him as a flawed great man with many achievements to his credit. One of Adam's friends explains that the election was "a last hurrah" for the kind of old-style machine politics that Skeffington had mastered. Developments in American public life, including the consequences of the New Deal, have so changed the face of city politics that Skeffington no longer can survive in the new age with younger voters. And prophetically, for the first time, television ads win the day.
Reading it as a teenager in high school I was fascinated with the realistic portrayal of politics and the impact on the city and family of the larger-than-life Skeffington. Both a popular and literary success when published, it remains in my memory as one of the best political novels I have ever read. ( )

ספר פוליטי אמריקני טוב ( )

The last hurrah by Edwin O'Connor
Newspaper worker watching the polls and attending meetings that the politicians are speaking at as they run for mayor.
Others around town show up when the candidates are speaking about the town issues. After the heart attack the mans son comes to find out what happened and how others saw things occuring. ( )