Dewey Defeats Truman (1997)

Dewey Defeats Truman

Thomas Mallon's novel, published by Pantheon in 1997, is set in Owosso, Michigan, the hometown of Thomas E. Dewey, from June 1948, when the town expects its native son to be elected president that November. Anne Macmurray, a Connecticut-born Ann Arbor graduate who works at Abner's Bookshop while trying to write a novel of her own, is courted by two men: Peter Cox, the young Republican lawyer at Harold Feller's firm and a candidate for the state legislature, and Jack Riley, a UAW official from Flint home for the summer to look after his sick father. (Open Library)

Watches

Gruen watch

On her way to Abner's Bookshop the morning after the town celebrates Dewey's nomination, Anne looks down at her thin little Gruen wristwatch: it is already 9:20, late enough that even Leo Abner might lose his temper. She stops anyway for seventeen-year-old Billy Grimes, who has set up outside the post office on Exchange Street with the first Polaroid camera in Owosso and a giant photographic cutout of the governor, selling dollar portraits beside the candidate. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: Anne looked down at her thin little Gruen wristwatch. It was already 9:20, and if she was any later, even Leo Abner would likely lose his temper. (Thomas Mallon, Dewey Defeats Truman, scan cataloged as Pantheon Books, 1997, p. 33; Billy's Polaroid concession is set up on pp. 25 to 26; Internet Archive scan OCR)