Two words in red ink killed a screenplay and began a book.

In 1985 a young dramatist sent a teleplay about William Jennings Bryan to a historian for review. It came back with BAD DRAMA scrawled across the title page, and the play was buried. Forty years later the writer went back to find out whether the verdict had fallen on his work or on the man he had dared to take seriously.

The Magnificent Loser is a work of literary nonfiction that braids two lives into one reckoning. Along one strand runs Bryan himself, the prairie orator who lost the presidency three times and was turned by his enemies into a national joke: the Cross of Gold, the long war against empire, the resignation from the State Department, the convention floor where he would not name the Klan, and the courtroom at Dayton where Clarence Darrow and H. L. Mencken finished the cartoon. Along the other runs the author's own four-decade argument with the historian who marked his teleplay and then gave his career to guarding Bryan's name.

What comes of it is a study of how a country chooses its fools, and what that choice costs the people who refuse to join the laughter. Bryan warned a rising power against cruelty and conquest and was answered with a contempt that hardened into history. To recover him is to ask how we decide who deserves our scorn, and whether a verdict can ever be reopened.

For fans of Michael Kazin, Edward Larson, and Jon Meacham, and for anyone drawn to the long American argument over populism, memory, and the cost of failure, here is a reckoning with a man the country was taught to laugh at, told by the writer who was once told he had gotten him wrong.