A rich man decides New Hampshire needs him as governor, and finds the state is already owned — by the railroad, whose lawyers select the legislature the way a man picks a suit. Churchill, the American novelist so often confused with the British statesman that the two agreed the Englishman would sign himself Winston S. Churchill, wrote this in 1908 out of his own run for office, and it reads as reportage with the names changed. Fifty-five plates from Winslow Homer to Edvard Munch, spanning 1826 to 1927, gather train smoke, courthouse jurors, and Adirondack villages into a visual record of the same American scene Churchill put into prose.
