Allen Stuart Drury was born on September 2, 1918, in Houston, Texas, to Flora Allen and Alden Monteith Drury. His mother was a legislative representative for the California Parent-Teacher Association, while his father managed the citrus industry, worked in insurance, and was a real estate broker. Drury had an sister named Anne Elizabeth.
In 1943, Drury, a 25-year-old Army veteran, began working as the Senate correspondent for United Press International. This position provided him with valuable insight into the Senate, which he documented in a journal of his views on the Senate and individual senators. His journal also captured the events of the 78th and 79th Congresses. Although written in the mid-1940s, the diary was not published until 1963, under the title "A Senate Journal". Drury's greatest success came with his novel "Advise and Consent" in 1959, which was about the consideration of a controversial nominee for secretary of state in the Senate. The book was inspired by the suicide of Lester C. Hunt, senator from Wyoming, and spent 102 weeks on the New York Times' best-seller list. The success of the book led to several sequels, including "A Shade of Difference," "Capable of Honor," and "Preserve & Protect".
Drury also wrote two alternative sequels based on a different outcome of an assassination attack in an earlier work: "Come Nineveh, Come Tyre" & "The Promise of Joy". In 1971, he published 'The Throne of Saturn', a sf novel about the 1st attempt at sending a manned mission to Mars. He dedicated the work "To the US Astronauts & those who help them fly." He also wrote stand-alone novels, "Decision" & "Pentagon", as well as several other fiction & non-fiction works. Drury's political novels have been described as page-turners, set against the Cold War, with an aggressive USSR seeking to undermine the USA. Drury lived in Tiburon, CA from '64 until his '98 cardiac arrest. He'd completed his 20th novel, 'Public Men' set at Stanford, just two weeks before his death. He died on 9/2/98 at St Mary's Medical Center in San Francisco, on his 80th birthday. He never married.