Works by
William F. Buckley, Jr.
(Writer)
[November 24, 1925 – February 27, 2008]

Books

Biography/Memoirs

• Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography (2004)
  Miles Gone By is a landmark literary event: the autobiography of William F. Buckley Jr., woven from personal pieces composed over the course of a celebrated writing life of more than fifty years.
  
  Here is Buckley the boy, growing up in a family of ten rambunctious children, with a saintly mother and spirited father; Buckley the daring young political controversialist and enfant terrible whose debut book, God and Man at Yale, was a shocking New York Times bestseller; Buckley the editor of National Review, widely hailed as the founder of the modern conservative movement; Buckley the politician and mischievous humorist; Buckley the proud father and devoted husband; Buckley the spy and novelist of spies; and Buckley the yachtsman and bon vivant.
  
  Along the way, you'll be treated to Buckley's romance with wine, his love of the right word, his intoxication with music, and his joy in skiing and travel.
  
  You'll also meet Buckley's friends: Ronald Reagan, "zestfully concerned for the company of others"; Henry Kissinger "amusing, curious, ever-so-lightly irreverent"; Clare Boothe Luce, "a renowned beauty and man of affairs (a feminist, she stoutly resisted the stylistic effronteries of she-speech)"; Tom Wolfe, with "a trace of a Virginia accent, and of course there is the renowned diffidence, the matador taking tea with his mother"; John Kenneth Galbraith, who "consistently writes pleasant tributes to my own books, inevitably advising the reader that my political opinions should be ignored, my fiction or accounts of life at sea appreciated"; David Niven, of whom "my wife suspected that his magic was to induce a whim, so that he could gratify it"; and many others.
  
  This unforgettable work paints a wonderful and indelible picture of an extraordinary man and his extraordinary life.

• Nearer, My God: An Autobiography of Faith (1997)
  This is the story of one man's faith, told with unrivaled reflection and candor. William F. Buckley, Jr., was raised a Catholic. As the world plunged into war, and as social mores changed dramatically around him, Buckley's faith -- a most essential part of his make-up -- sustained him. In Nearer, My God, Buckley examines in searching detail the meaning of his faith, and how his life has been shaped and sustained by religious conviction. In highly personal terms, and with the wit and acuity for which he is justly renowned, Buckley discusses vital issues of Catholic doctrine and practice, and in so doing outlines for the reader both the nature of CathoLic faith and the essential role of religious belief in everyday life. In powerfully felt prose, he contributes provocatively and intelligently to the national interest in the nature of religion, the Church, and spiritual development. Nearer, My God is sure to appeal to all readers who have felt the stirrings of their own religious faith, and who want confirmation of their beliefs or who are seeking a guide to understanding their own souls. The renowned social and political commentator, William F. Buckley Jr., turns to a highly personal subject -- his faith. And he tells us the story of his life as a Catholic Christian. "Nearer, My God" is the most reflective, poignant, and searching of Bill Buckley's many books. In the opening chapters he relives his childhood, a loving, funny, nostalgic glimpse into pre-World War II America and England. He speaks about his religious experiences to a world that has changed dramatically. He is unafraid of revealing the most personal side of his faith. He describes, in his distinctive style, the intimacy of a trip to Lourdes, the impact on him of the searing account by Maria Valtorta of the Crucifixion, the ordination of his nephew into the priesthood, and gives a moving account of his mother's death. And there is humor, as Buckley gives a unique, hilarious view of a visit to the Vatican with Malcolm Muggeridge, Charlton Heston, Grace Kelly, and David Niven. Personal though this book is, Buckley has gone to others to examine new perspectives, putting together his own distinguished 'Forum' and leaning on the great literature of the past to illustrate his thinking on contemporary Catholic and Christian issues.

Children

• The National Review Treasury of Classic Children's Literature (2003), William F. Buckley, Jr., ed.
  Ages 4-8.
  Containing stories from National Review's private collection of St. Nicholas Magazine volumes (spanning the period from 1874 through the 1930s), this beautifully crafted and lavishly illustrated book includes some of the most entertaining, touching, and wholesome children's stories that have ever graced paper.
  
  The National Review Treasury of Classic Children's Literature brings back over forty literary gems--many long forgotten. Now, in the light of a new generation, they are as radiant, if not more radiant, than they were when first published. It will take the family who owns it on an exciting voyage, back to the Golden Era of children's literature--a more innocent time when the famous St. Nicholas Magazine offered the youth of America a monthly cornucopia of wonderful stories, tales, fables, and adventures, written by the literary giants of the time.
  
  An unsurpassed compilation of wonderful children's stories by great writers--or in the opinion of many, the greatest writers--this is a volume that can be counted on to provide youngsters and teens with superlative prose and poetry that entertain and, more importantly, promote and instill those values and lessons increasingly needed in our current culture.

Fiction

• The Rake: A Novel (2007)
  An ambitious, roguish young presidential candidate . . . a lifetime of inconvenient secrets . . . a decision to save a candidacy—all at a fatal cost: These are the provocative threads that master storyteller William F. Buckley Jr. weaves into this gripping yet surprisingly empathetic political novel.
  
  The Rake brings together Buckley's keen political insight and his tale-spinning craft to tell the story of a candidate on the rise and the dark shadows cast behind him. As Reuben Castle, the prototypical child of the sixties, coasts through his early life on a cloud of easy charisma, he leaves behind more skeletons than Arlington: a highly questionable Vietnam record, an abandoned wife, and worse. Yet two decades later, just as his dreams are within reach, he learns that his personal history is about to become his political epitaph—unless he takes the direst of measures to protect himself.
  
  With a blend of satire and suspense, Buckley offers an archly pointed portrait of a familiar icon. A novel by the defining conservative of our times, about a figure bearing an unmistakable resemblance to the defining liberal of our times, The Rake is a welcome new masterpiece, and Buckley's most winning, and provocative, novel in years.

• Getting It Right (2003)
  This book is a sweeping tale that takes us from the Hungarian uprising of 1956, Cold War espionage, and tempestuous romance, to political skullduggery in 1960's America.

• Nuremberg: The Reckoning (2002)
  Sebastian Reinhardt, a young German-American, is yanked from routine army duty in America to serve as an interpreter at Nuremberg's Palace of Justice in 1945. He hears the stories of the infamous Nazi killers and war makers, who face prosecutors determined to bring them to justice, and encounters the towering figures of twentieth-century legal, political, and military history, among them Justice Robert Jackson, Albert Speer, Hermann Goering, and the dark, untried shadow of Adolf Hitler. As the trial unfolds, Sebastian must come to terms with his family legacy and national identity.
  
  With his renowned authority and audacity, William F. Buckley Jr. creates a riveting thriller, taking the reader through unforgettable scenes of treachery and vengeance, love and hatred, and the struggle for justice found in a hangman's noose.

• Elvis in the Morning (2001)
  This is a novel about friendship, a novel that spans the decades that changed America forever.
  
  Orson is a young boy whose mother works at a U.S. Army base in Germany in the 1950s. There, he becomes a fan of a G.I. stationed at the base, one Elvis Presley, whose music is played over and over on the radio. When Orson is caught stealing recordings of Elvis's tunes from the PX, the attendant publicity catches the star's attention, and he comes to visit his young fan. Thus begins a lifelong friendship. As Elvis's career rockets ever higher and his behavior becomes ever more erratic, the two share many adventures. The sixties explode, and Elvis becomes the icon of the nation, while Orson, a college demonstrator, drifts away from regular life while looking for something of substance to believe in. Each man is an emblem of his time, as social conventions crumble, barriers fall, and the cultural landscape changes forever.
  
  A panorama of change and dissent, of the ability of friends to stay true despite distance and time, Elvis in the Morning portrays a nation in change and the effects of celebrity on innocence.

• Spytime: The Undoing of James Jesus Angleton (2001)
  James Jesus Angleton was an enigma, a secretive man whose power was at its peak during the height of the Cold War. Founder of U.S. counter-intelligence, hunter of moles and foes of America, his name has become synonymous with skulduggery and subterfuge. Angleton pursued his enemies, real and imagined, with a cool, calculating intelligence. Eventually convinced that there was a turncoat within the highest reaches of the U.S. government, Angleton turned all of his considerable skills to finding and exposing him. The result was a near-victory for U.S. Intelligence-and total defeat for himself. A brilliant re-creation of a world that included Soviet defectors, the infamous traitors Burgess, MacLean, and Philby, and American presidents from Truman to Carter, Spytime traces the making-and unmaking-of a man without a peer and, at the end, a man without a country to serve.

• The Redhunter: A Novel Based on the Life of Senator Joe McCarthy (1999)
  From America's most celebrated conservative writer, William F. Buckley Jr., comes an engrossing and unexpected historical novel about one of the most controversial figures in American political history - Senator Joe McCarthy.
  
  Senator McCarthy rose and fell in just four years, yet he gave a name, lastingly, to an era. In 1952 he was the most lionized and the most hated man in America. But little was known about the man or his background. McCarthy's personal charm and single-minded determination took him from Wisconsin and his indigent life as a chicken farmer to Washington, D.C., as the youngest United States senator. But it wasn't until February 9, 1950, in Wheeling, West Virginia, that McCarthy bewitched the nation - and unleashed a crusade - with his claim that Communists had infiltrated the United States government.
  
  In The Redhunter, a wonderful blend of fact and fiction, Buckley tells the story of Harry Bontecou. Freshly graduated from Columbia, Bontecou joins McCarthy and remains at his side for three critical years. But when McCarthy's judgment becomes clouded by prosecutional zeal and reckless extravagance, Bontecou delivers the ultimatum: McCarthy must choose between Bontecou and Roy Cohn, McCarthy's ruthless aide. By then we have seen at close hand Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, J. Edgar Hoover, and Dean Acheson in memorable portraits of leaders in action.

• Brothers No More (1995)
  Bestselling author William F. Buckley, Jr., offers a terrific new novel -- in the gloriously gripping tradition of Howard Fast, Irwin Shaw, and Jeffrey Archer -- of men and women caught between the force of history and the power of their own desires.
  
  Italy, 1944. Pfc. Danny O'Hara and Pfc. Henry Chafee are part of a regiment ordered to attack a German unit north of Rome. But at the critical moment, one young man's courage fails him. Court-martial and shame are averted only by the other's apparently valiant effort to cover for him. A complex lifelong bond is thus forged between two men who seem an unlikely match. Henry is the son of a widowed librarian, quiet, studious, devoted to his sister, Caroline. Danny is gregarious, charming, aglow with the glamour of wealth and privilege. He is also the President's grandson. Brothers No More is the sweeping story of the lives and times of these two men -- one searching to redeem his courage and resolve, the other undone by his own ambition and greed -- both spellbound by the devout and beautiful Caroline. From the European theater of World War II to the deadly jungles of Vietnam, from the verdant lawns of Yale to the glittering casinos of the French Riviera, from the intimate warmth of a suburban home to the most rarefied corridors of corporate power, Brothers No More spans continents and decades to touch on some of the most significant events in modern history.
  
  With the masterful storytelling power, sophisticated wit, and deft blend of fact and fiction that have won William F. Buckley, Jr., legions of devoted readers around the world, Brothers No More is an unforgettable novel of honor, betrayal, and faith.

• The Temptation of Wilfred Malachey (1985)

Blackford Oakes Series

1. Saving the Queen  (1976)
   America's top financial secret agent Blackford Oakes performed his first heroic effort in Saving the Queen in which William F. Buckley Jr. coaxes readers back to the earliest days of the Cold War. The year is 1951. Harry Truman is president, and the beautiful, young Queen Caroline has just settled onto the throne of England.
   
   The CIA is baffled at the shocking things going on in London. Vital Western military secrets are falling into Soviet hands and, worst of all, the leak has been traced directly to the queen's chambers. A recent Yale graduate and ex-combat pilot, the debonair Oakes is selected to penetrate the royal circle, win the queen's confidence, and plug the leak. It all leads to an explosive showdown in the skies over London, one that could determine the future of the West.

2. Stained Glass (1978)

3. Who's on First (1980)
   Who's On First is the story of the race between the United States and the Soviet Union to be the first to place a satellite in orbit. All of us know who was first, but Buckley's fictional re-creation of the events leading up to that historical fact will keep the listener on edge.
   
   As with all of Buckley's novels of cold war skulduggery, his wit and elan show through in the statements of his insouciant alter ego, Blackie. Buckley spices the dialogue with vignettes between the then CIA Director Allen Dulles and former Secretary of State Dean Acheson.

4. Marco Polo If You Can (1982)

5. The Story of Henry Tod: Blackford Oakes in Berlin (1984)

6. See You Later, Alligator: Blackford Oakes in Havana (1985)

7. High Jinx (1986)

8. Mongoose, R.I.P. (1987)
   The year is 1963. Fidel Castro seeks revenge for his humiliation during the missile crisis while President Kennedy and his brother Robert have their own plan for ending the menance of the Caribbean dictator. It's called Operation Mongoose.
   
   Blackford Oakes, the CIA's urbane ace agent, becomes point man in the plot. Then Oakes learns there is a counterplan, one that scripts Oakes out of the play!

9. Tucker's Last Stand (1990)

10. A Very Private Plot (1993)
    The year is 1995, and an ambitious U.S. senator wants to weaken the power of the CIA, perhaps to the point of its elimination. To accomplish this goal, he tries to enlist Blackford Oakes—now retired—into his cause by forcing him to testify before a senate committee about CIA covert activities in 1985. The senator wants to know what President Ronald Reagan did when informed of a plot by Soviet veterans of the Afghan war to assassinate Mikhail Gorbachev, who had just risen to power. What will Oakes do? Will the senator be able to force him to testify? Or will Oakes be able to draw upon the wit and savoir faire that saved the day on so many previous occasions?

11. The Blackford Oakes Reader (1999)
    It all started when editor Sam Vaughan asked William F. Buckley, "Why don't you try a novel?" To which America's most renowned conservative replied, "Sam, why don't you play a trumpet concerto?" Vaughan didn't take up this musical challenge, but he did send Buckley a book contract the next morning, and therein lies the origin of the Blackford Oakes novels, ten stories of international intrigue with Oakes, a distinctly American CIA agent, serving as a protagonist.
    
    The Blackford Oakes Reader is a collection of the character studies that lie at the heart of these novels. As Buckley explains in his introduction, "In the first novel I guess it is correct to say that I got the idea that it should frame one person (primarily). That person's character and experiences should illuminate the story."
    
    Oakes himself is the focus of the first book, Saving the Queen. Subsequently, Buckley would examine an aristocrat trying to exert his will on post-Hitler Germany, a pair of scientists dealing with life in the Soviet Union after confinement in the Gulag, a Spaniard serving as a pawn for the Party in Communist Cuba, and eight other diverse characters, all of whom find their lives entangled in the web of international espionage.
    
    Through his characters, Buckley gives a personal perspective to the most important and intriguing world events of the past 50 years. And his original introduction to the Blackford Oakes Reader, outlining the genesis of the novels, is in itself a treasure for Blackford Oakes fans.

12. Last Call for Blackford Oakes (2005)

Non-fiction

• Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription: Notes and Asides from National Review Magazine (2007)
  Four decades of William F. Buckley Jr.'s famous (and infamous) wit in a volume that will be the political gift book of the season.
  
  Who knew that William F. Buckley Jr., the quintessential conservative, invented the blog decades before the World Wide Web came into existence? National Review, like nearly all magazines, has always published letters from readers. In 1967 the magazine decided that certain letters merited different treatment, and Buckley, the editor, began a column called "Notes & Asides," in which he personally answered the most notable and outrageous letters.
  
  The selections in this book, culled from four decades of these columns, include exchanges with such figures as Ronald Reagan, Eric Sevareid, Richard Nixon, A. M. Rosenthal, Auberon Waugh, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. There are also hilarious exchanges with ordinary readers, as well as letters from Buckley to various organizations and government agencies.

• The Fall of the Berlin Wall (2004)
  Overnight, it became a powerful symbol of the stark and bitter divisions of the Cold War. The Berlin Wall was more than a symbol, however. For nearly thirty years, it separated families, kept millions of people in virtual slavery, and took the lives of many whose unquenchable thirst for freedom drove them to climb over, tunnel under, or sneak past the wall.
  
  In The Fall of the Berlin Wall, renowned author and conservative pioneer William F. Buckley Jr. explains why the wall was built, reveals its devastating impact on the lives of people on both sides, and provides a riveting account of the events that led to the wall’s destruction and the end of the Cold War.
  
  Writing with rare intensity and passion, Buckley examines the political, military, and human realities of occupied Germany in the early years of the Cold War. He recounts the Soviets’ repeated violations of the Four-Power Agreements that governed the occupation as they folded East Germany into their growing empire, and he documents the failure of NATO–and successive American presidents–to stand firm against Soviet bullying.
  
  Buckley also creates detailed and perceptive portraits of such major players as East Germany’s dour and disapproving secretary general Walter Ulbricht; Konrad Adenauer, the beloved "der Alte," chancellor of West Germany; Berlin mayor Willy Brandt; and American general Lucius Clay, who faced down the Soviets at Checkpoint Charlie. His analysis of behind-the-scenes squabbling on both sides informs and entertains as it connects developments in the years-long conflict over Berlin with the Cuban Missile Crisis and other major Cold War events.
  
  This fast-paced history overflows with the famous Buckley wit and insight as it documents the heroic, inventive, and sometimes heartbreaking efforts of ordinary people to escape the soul-killing East German regime. You’ll meet the young couple who swam a river with their infant child in their arms; the engineering student who convinced an American television network to finance his escape tunnel; and the construction worker who was left to die in agony after being shot by East German border guards. You’ll also relive the giddy celebration that followed the opening of the border and drew thousands of Berliners to the wall, hammers and chisels in hand, bent on tearing down the hated barrier, chunk by jagged chunk.
  
  Complete with an analysis of how Ronald Reagan’s hard-nosed foreign policy undermined Warsaw Pact dictators, emboldened dissidents, and finally made the dream of freedom a reality in Eastern Europe, The Fall of the Berlin Wall is Buckley at his wry and contentious best. It is sure to delight conservatives, annoy liberals, and enlighten everyone who reads it.

• Let Us Talk of Many Things: The Collected Speeches (2001)
  William F. Buckley Jr. has long been admired for his remarkable gifts as a writer, debater, and orator. The man who helped ignite the modern conservative movement has for the past fifty years played a significant role in the great social debates that have shaped our country and indeed the world. In the course of his long career, he has given hundreds of speeches to generations of listeners.

• Buckley: The Right Word (1998)
  The book his readers have asked for--on the uses and abuses of language, vocabulary, diction and dictionaries, journals and journalists, style, eloquence, interviews and reviews -- Buckley: The Right Word includes interviews with Charlie Rose and The Paris Review, verbal encounters with Borges, le Carre, Galbraith, Schlesinger, Playboy, Cosmopolitan, The New York Times, essays on formality and style--even a Buckley lexicon.

• The Lexicon: A Cornucopia of Wonderful Words for the Inquisitive Word Lover (1998) with Arnold Roth, Illustrator
  This boon to logophiles, culled from Buckley: The Right Word, presents the author’s most erudite, outré, and interesting words - from prehensile and sciolist to rubric and histrionic - complete with definitions, examples, and usage notes.

• Happy Days Were Here Again: Reflections of a Libertarian Journalist 1993)

• In Search of Anti-Semitism (1992)

• Windfall: The End of the Affair (1992)

• Gratitude: Reflections on What We Owe to Our Country (1990)
  William F. Buckley, Jr., "Mr. Conservative," believes that something must be done to revive our youth's indifference to today's government and politics.
  
  In Gratitude he offers a plan for universal voluntary national service for men and women 18 years of age and older. Here are his suggestions for how such a program might be structured and administered; on the inducements and sanctions appropriate to its realization; analysis of the benefits, material and spiritual, that would come to those who serve; and an idea of the benefits to those who are served.

• On the Firing Line: The Public Life of Our Public Figures (1989)

• Big Game Hunting in Central Africa(1988)

• Racing Through Paradise: A Pacific Passage (1987)

• Right Reason: A Collection Selected by Richard Brookheiser (1985)

• Airborne, a Sentimental Journey (1984)

• Overdrive:  A Personal Documentary (1983)

• Atlantic High: A Celebration (1982)

• William F. Buckley, Jr. & Malcolm Muggeridge on Faith (1981)

• Hymnal the Controversial Arts (1978)

• Essays on Hayek (1977) with Fritz Machlup, ed.

• Execution Eve and Other Contemporary Ballads (1975)

• United Nations Journal: A Delegate's Odyssey (1974)

• Four Reforms: A Guide for the Seventies (1973)

• Inveighing We Will Go (1972)

• Cruising Speed: A Documentary (1971)

• The Govenor Listeth A Book of Inspired Political Revelations (1970)

• The Jeweler's Eye (1969) with Robert Josephy, Illustrator

• The Unmaking of a Mayor (1966)

• Rumbles Left and Right: A Book About Troubling People and Ideas (1963)

• The Committee and Its Critics;A Calm Review of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (1962)

• Up From Liberalism (1961)

• McCarthy and His Enemies: The Record and Its Meaning (1954)

• God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom (1951)
  In 1951, a twenty-five-year old Yale graduate published his first book, which exposed the extraordinarily irresponsible educational attitude that prevailed at his alma mater. This book rocked the academic world and catapulted its young author, William F. Buckley Jr., into the public spotlight.

Other

• William F. Buckley, Jr.'s 365 Words You'd Like to Know 1993 Calendar (1993)

• Buckley-Little Book Catalogue 1987 (1987) with Stuart W. Little

• Smiling through the Apocalypse: Esquire's History of the Sixties (1970) by Harold Hayes
  Includes contributions by Gore Vidal, James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, Timothy Leary, Tom Wolfe, William F. Buckley Jr., William Burroughs, and William Styron.

• Dialogues In Americanism (1964)
  Includes pieces by Lt. Brent Bozell, James MacGregor Burns, Robert M. Hutchens, Steve Allen, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Willmoore Kendall.

See also:

• Strictly Right: William F. Buckley Jr. and the American Conservative Movement (2007) by John R. Coyne, Jr. and Linda Bridges

• Chairman Bill: A Biography of William F. Buckley, Jr. (2006) by David Miller

• Living It Up With National Review (2005) by Priscilla L. Buckley

• William F. Buckley Jr: A Bibliography (2002) by William F. Meehan III

• William F. Buckley, Jr.: Pied Piper for the Establishment (2002) by John F. McManus

• From the Wandering Jew to William F. Buckley, Jr. (2000) by Martin Gardner

• William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives (1988) by John B. Judis

• Odyssey of a Friend: Letters To William F. Buckley, Jr. 1954-1961 (1969) by Whittaker Chambers