The Lanny Budd Novels Volume One

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning series, the first four novels featuring an American who comes of age during the turbulent years of the early 20th century.

In World’s End, Lanning “Lanny” Budd's language skills and talent for decoding messages are in high demand as WWI bursts over Europe. When the hostilities conclude, Lanny joins the Paris Peace Conference as the assistant to a geographer asked by President Woodrow Wilson to redraw the map of Europe.

In Between Two Worlds, Lanny travels to Italy and witnesses the brutal charisma of Benito Mussolini. Meanwhile, in Germany, the failed Beer Hall Putsch led by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party strikes an ominous note. After two star-crossed love affairs, Lanny marries a wealthy heiress and returns to the U.S. just in time for the 1929 stock market crash.

Winner of the 1943 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Dragon’s Teeth captures the nightmarish march toward the Second World War. In Germany to visit relatives, Lanny encounters a disturbing atmosphere of hatred and jingoism stoked by the Nazi Party and meets the group’s fanatical leader, Adolf Hitler. But Lanny’s gravest fear is the threat to his Jewish friends and family—a threat that impels him to risk his life to rescue his loved ones from a terrible fate.

“Few works of fiction are more fun to read; fewer still make history half as clear, or as human.” —Time

“When people ask me what has happened in my long lifetime, I do not refer them to the newspaper files and to the authorities, but to [Sinclair’s] novels.” —George Bernard Shaw

“[The] most faithful portrait of that period that has been done.” —H. G. Wells