A Thing of State is a 1995 political novel by Allen Drury which follows the U.S. State Department's response to a crisis in the Middle East. It is a standalone work set in a different fictional timeline from Drury's 1959 novel Advise and Consent, which earned him a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.A Thing of State was the last novel Drury saw published before his death in 1998; his final novel, Public Men, was published posthumously.