The story of a family.
The story of an empire.
The story of a nation.
Moving from Mississippi to Paris to New York and back again, American Pop is a saga of family, ambition, passion, and tragedy that brings to life one unforgettable Southern dynasty—the Forsters, founders of the world’s first major soft-drink company—against the backdrop of more than a century of American cultural history.
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“Mr. Wright’s imagined history of the rise and fall of the sugary drink empire is so robust and recognizable that you might feel nostalgic for the taste of a soda you’ve never had.”
— Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
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Available from HarperCollins at IndieBound, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon. Read excerpts of the novel at the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, Literary Hub, and The Coil Magazine.
The child of immigrants, Houghton Forster has always hungered for more—from his time as a young boy in Mississippi, working twelve-hour days at his father’s drugstore; to the moment he first laid eyes on his future wife Annabelle Teague, a true Southern belle of aristocratic lineage; to his invention of the delicious fizzy drink that would transform him from tiller boy into the founder of an empire, the Panola Cola Company, and entice a youthful, enterprising nation entering a hopeful new age.
As the heads of a preeminent American family spoken about in the same breath as the Hearsts and the Rockefellers, Houghton and Annabelle raise their four children with the expectation they’ll one day become world leaders. The burden of greatness falls early on eldest son Montgomery, a handsome and successful politician who has never recovered from the horrors and heartbreak of the Great War. His younger siblings Ramsey and Lance, known as the “infernal twins,” are rivals not only in wit and beauty, but in their utter carelessness with the lives and hearts of others. Their brother Harold, as gentle and caring as the twins can be cruel, is slowed by a mental disability—and later generations seem equally plagued by misfortune, forcing Houghton to seriously consider: Who should control the company after he’s gone?
A tour de force of original storytelling, American Pop is an irresistible blend of fact and fiction, the mundane and the mythical, and utilizes techniques of historical reportage to capture how, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s words, “families are always rising and falling in America,” and to explore the many ways in which nostalgia can manipulate cultural memory—and the stories we choose to tell about ourselves.
“A sweeping account of how a family fortune is always variably defined by its different generations, from quest to curse and all stations in between, Snowden Wright’s grand and generous American Pop all-too-convincingly renders his American dynasty a mere museum piece in the end, revealing along the way a tough-as-nails sensibility that I much admired.”
— Joshua Ferris, bestselling author of To Rise Again at a Decent Hour
“The fortune of the Forster family was built on fizz but sustained by grit, luck, and cunning. This spectacular novel blends history and lore as it follows the story of Houghton and Annabelle, who fall in love and, as they build a life together, build an empire. This is an American saga of one man’s ambition, the woman who stoked it, and the family whose complex identity it became. Snowden Wright takes us into the heart of the Deep South with insight, sophistication, and humor. What a ride!”
— Adriana Trigiani, New York Times bestselling author of Kiss Carlo
“In American Pop, Snowden Wright chronicles the extraordinary lives of one Mississippi family, the Forsters, who are so hellbent on loving each other that they destroy each other instead. This novel captures the best and worst of the twentieth century against a backdrop that includes the reconstructed South, the unspeakable events of WWI, and the end of American idealism. Wright shows us first what it means to belong to a family; then he shows us what it costs to belong to a country. A remarkable achievement.”
— Jeffery Renard Allen, award-winning author of Song of the Shank and Rails Under My Back
“‘The past is not dead; it’s not even past,’ William Faulkner once said, and in fellow Mississippian Snowden Wright’s excellent debut, past and present blend to reveal a particularly American story of one family’s ascent and fall. Like Panola Cola, the soft drink that makes the Forster family fortune, American Pop is supremely unique and immensely satisfying.”
— Ron Rash, bestselling author of The Risen
“You’ll be up all night reading American Pop; rich Mississippians loose on the world, committing hi-jinks, and with a lovely, satisfying ending. A great read.”
— Paulette Jiles, bestselling author of News of the World
“The House of Forster is built on bubbles; watching each wealth-addled generation try not to blow the family fortune and/or disgrace its name provides not only excellent Gothic fun but a panoramic tour of the American Century—and Snowden Wright’s voice has all the Southern charm and lightly worn wisdom you’d expect from a writer with a name like Snowden Wright.”
— Jonathan Dee, author of the Pulitzer Prize Finalist The Privileges