ABSTRACT
When in the forties I turned first to the practice and then to the professional study of public administration, I turned also to the reading of “administrative novels”—as I came to call them. The exact time, the first novel, these are lost in the mists. In any case I was neither the first nor the only student of public administration to recognize that novelists occasionally center a story (or part of a story) in a public bureaucracy; and that reading these stories may be both interesting and professionally rewarding. Humbert Wolfe, for example, reported in the mid-twenties on “Some Public Servants in Fiction,” 2 and in the late forties Rowland Egger and Stephen K. Bailey gave praise to some administrative novels of the postwar period. 3
