American Pop A Novel
American Pop by Snowden Wright is a reprint edition published by HarperCollins Publishers on February 18, 2020. This novel spans 416 pages and is presented in English. It narrates the saga of the Forster family, founders of the world’s first major soft-drink company, against the backdrop of over a century of American cultural history, moving from Mississippi to Paris and New York. The story intertwines themes of family, ambition, and tragedy, highlighting the rise and fall of both a family and an empire.
Readers will find a rich exploration of the Forster family’s dynamics, particularly through the experiences of Houghton Forster, who transforms from a boy in a drugstore to the head of a prominent American dynasty. The narrative delves into the lives of Houghton and his wife Annabelle, as well as their four children, each grappling with their own challenges and expectations. The novel blends historical elements with fictional storytelling, reflecting on how nostalgia shapes cultural memory and the narratives we construct about our lives.
Official synopsis Publisher
AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
“Mr. Wright’s imagined history of the rise and fall of the sugary drink empire is so robust and recognizable that you might feel nostalgic for the taste of a soda you’ve never had.” – Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK BY Parade * Cosmopolitan * Town & Country * AARP * InStyle * Garden & Gun * Vol. 1 Brooklyn
The story of a family.
The story of an empire.
The story of a nation.
Moving from Mississippi to Paris to New York and back again, a saga of family, ambition, passion, and tragedy that brings to life one unforgettable Southern dynasty–the Forsters, founders of the world’s first major soft-drink company–against the backdrop of more than a century of American cultural history.
The child of immigrants, Houghton Forster has always wanted more–from his time as a young boy in Mississippi, working twelve-hour days at his father’s drugstore; to the moment he first laid eyes on his future wife, Annabelle Teague, a true Southern belle of aristocratic lineage; to his invention of the delicious fizzy drink that would transform him from tiller boy into the founder of an empire, the Panola Cola Company, and entice a youthful, enterprising nation entering a hopeful new age.
Now the heads of a preeminent American family spoken about in the same breath as the Hearsts and the Rockefellers, Houghton and Annabelle raise their four children with the expectation they’ll one day become world leaders. The burden of greatness falls early on eldest son Montgomery, a handsome and successful politician who has never recovered from the horrors and heartbreak of the Great War. His younger siblings Ramsey and Lance, known as the “infernal twins,” are rivals not only in wit and beauty, but in their utter carelessness with the lives and hearts of others. Their brother Harold, as gentle and caring as the twins can be cruel, is slowed by a mental disability–and later generations seem equally plagued by misfortune, forcing Houghton to seriously consider who should control the company after he’s gone.
An irresistible tour de force of original storytelling, American Pop blends fact and fiction, the mundane and the mythical, and utilizes techniques of historical reportage to capture how, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s words, “families are always rising and falling in America,” and to explore the many ways in which nostalgia can manipulate cultural memory–and the stories we choose to tell about ourselves.
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