The Adventures of Mao on the Long March

By: Frederic Tuten

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Synopsis: A revolutionary comic masterpiece, an icon of literature as American pop art, and a book unlike any other, "The Adventures of Mao on the Long March" breaks all frames. Frederic Tuten's subversive, witty, and triumphant 1971 novel is caught somewhere between the clear-eyed rhapsodies of James Fenimore Cooper and Mao Tse Tung's own "Address to the Yenan Forum on Art and Literature". Tuten peppers his deadpan textbook narrative of Mao's long march with loving parodies of Hemingway, Kerouac, Dos Passos, and Malamud. As John Updike comments, the book includes: "twenty-seven pages of straight history of the Long March" and "thirty-six and a half pages of quotations in quotation marks, from unidentified sources (such as, diligent research discovers, Hawthorne's Marble Faun, Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean...) and twenty-six pages of what might be considered normal novelistic substance, imaginary encounters and conversation.