In 1968 Dwight Waldo published The Novelist on Organization and Administration: An Inquiry into the Relationships Between the Two Worlds. His very simple observation was that “one can learn much about administration from novels” (1968, 4). After thirty years, it may be a time to re-examine both the literary and academic side of Waldo’s novel approach. The article offers Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano and David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, one classic and one contemporary work, as vehicles for revisiting Waldo’s pedagogy and reestablishing the linkage between administration and administrative novels.
