"We live in the Republic of Feel-Good in a time when all the scum of America is rising to the top." So begins Public Men, the final novel of "the University trilogy" in which Pulitzer Prize winner Allen Drury concludes some fifty years in the lives of the members of the World War II generation whose stories he began on the eve of the war in the novel Toward What Bright Glory?

The second novel, Into What Far Harbor?, carries them on through the challenges, triumphs, and tragedies of the war and on to the years when they must worry about their world and...