Leonard Drohan; his bestseller skewered bureaucracy

Laboring as a federal administrator at the Springfield Ordinance District, which went by the acronym SOD, he carefully observed bureaucratic excesses and frustrations that became satirical fodder for a novel he wrote at night after the children were asleep. In 1957, when Mr. Drohan was 34, “Come With Me to Macedonia’’ made it to the bestseller list of The New York Times.

“I think the book will cause some annoyance among the brass, and the annoyance probably will be in proportion to the rank,’’ he told the Globe in 1957.

Mr. Drohan, whose novel made him a hero to many bureaucrats with whom he toiled for the remainder of his career, died Tuesday in Overlook nursing home in Northampton of complications from Alzheimer’s disease. He was 86 and had lived in South Hadley and Brewster.

The novel drew mixed reviews, but in 1957 Publishers Weekly called it “a delightfully subtle, satirical book about American bureaucracy that makes for very amusing reading. There is a good love story, too, in which the hero finds true love after a narrow escape from the clutches of a beautiful woman who wants to instill in him the dubious qualities of ‘pep and ambition.’ ’’

For a time, the book turned Mr. Drohan into a writer to be watched. He shared the bestseller list with blockbusters such as “Peyton Place,’’ and was selected as a fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Ripton, Vt., attending when poet Robert Frost was a featured speaker.

The success of his novel, a literary equivalent of the TV show “The Office’’ for the Eisenhower era, was fleeting. Mr. Drohan wrote other books, but none was published. His work found homes in magazines such as “The Saturday Evening Post,’’ for which he wrote opinion pieces, and “Look’’ and “Life,’’ contributing joke lines for cartoons.

“His whole life was sort of the struggle between poet and pragmatist,’’ said Mr. Drohan’s son Kerry of Amherst, N.H., the editor of Globe North. “Having two sons and a family to support, he kept his government job while always wanting to write novels.’’

“I think he had the soul of a poet,’’ said Mr. Drohan’s other son, Glenn of North Adams, who is editor in chief of the North Adams Transcript. “He always stressed the importance of words in our life and was pretty amazing in giving us an appreciation of great literature.’’

Glenn said his father “was one of the most prolific readers I’ve ever seen. He read everything. He’d go to the library, and they were amazed to see him because every week he’d take out 20, 25 books.’’

Mr. Drohan passed that voracious habit on to his family. “Lunch was always a time to read,’’ Glenn said. “We didn’t sit around the table and have lunch because we were all too damned busy reading.’’

Leonard Joseph Drohan was born in South Hadley, where as a boy he delivered newspapers by horsecart. He and his sister were raised in a single-parent home during the Great Depression. The experience was difficult, but taught him discipline.

He graduated from South Hadley High and in 1942 enlisted in the Army, “where, as he put it, he was lucky enough to be assigned to a barracks of intellectuals and actually learned more in the Army from these barracks-mates than in school,’’ Kerry said.

Soldiers introduced Mr. Drohan to popular writers such as Raymond Chandler, to the plays of William Shakespeare, and to the poetry of Emily Dickinson.

He was stationed in the United States and London during World War II and returned to marry Elizabeth Goodwin, his sister Myllis’s friend, in 1948.

With financial assistance from the GI Bill, Mr. Drohan went to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, graduating in 1949 with a bachelor’s in political science. The following year, he received a master’s in public administration from Syracuse University in New York.

Mr. Drohan became an administrator for the federal government, later working as a computer systems analyst. He started at the Springfield Ordinance District, and then worked at the submarine base in Groton, Conn.

In 1963, he moved to the Washington, D.C., area, where he worked about 15 years, first as a computer analyst with NASA’s Apollo program and later with the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Mental Health.

He retired in 1978 and, after five years in Brewster, moved with his wife to South Hadley. She died in 1998.

While “Come With Me to Macedonia’’ brought Mr. Drohan brief fame, it created a few problems. “Some of the squirming in desk chairs after publication of the novel will be done very close to home because the author admits he drew on his experience at the Springfield Ordinance District,’’ the Globe wrote in 1957.

“They tried to demote him a couple of times, and he had a terrible struggle to move up,’’ Kerry said. “Yet others loved the book so much that he became a hero at the time. When he first went to work at NASA, there was a gathering of his fellow workers, and they pulled out his book and said, ‘We consider this our bible.’ The workers loved it, and the big ranking bureaucrats did not, because it exposed them.’’

The discomfort the novel caused bosses can be glimpsed in reviews such as one in Newsday, a Long Island, N.Y., newspaper, which said Mr. Drohan had penned “one of the funniest, fastest and most subtle spoofs of the military since ‘Mister Roberts.’ ’’

And a Chicago Tribune reviewer wrote: “There are two ways to expose an evil: one is to preach and the other is to tell a pointed story. Leonard Drohan has chosen the second way and has jabbed his point into the belly of the federal civil service.’’

In addition to his two sons, Mr. Drohan leaves his sister, Myllis Dressell of South Hadley, and two grandchildren.

A graveside service will be held at 12:30 p.m. tomorrow in the Village Cemetery in South Hadley Falls.