The Last Hurrah is the finest fiction about American politics. Edwin O’Connor’s 1956 book won the Atlantic prize for best novel, and John Ford made it into a movie.

Spencer Tracy won a best actor award for his portrayal of Frank Skeffington, a fictionalized James Michael Curley (the four-term Boston mayor, two-term convict, and one-term Massachusetts governor). O’Connor’s book and Ford’s film are valedictories to the broad-shouldered, deep-chested, Irish-Catholic Democratic political machines that ran Northeastern and Midwestern cities from about the Roaring ’20s to around the time when things all went wrong in the late ’60s.