In 1985, when Bernie Sanders was in his second term as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, a writer named Russell Banks published his breakthrough novel, Continental Drift. It would earn Banks the John Dos Passos Prize, and make him a finalist for the Pulitzer for fiction. Sometime after the book came out, Banks accepted an assignment to profile the self-described socialist mayor. He followed Sanders around the city, watched him interact with constituents, and recorded his candid views. He produced a remarkable and compelling portrait of a distinctive politician, but it never found its way into print. Instead, it was filed away for three decades.

It’s 6 p.m. on a warm, amber-colored, late-summer evening in Burlington, Vermont, suppertime in this southside, mostly working-class neighborhood, as Bernard Sanders, the mayor of the city, and George Thabault, one of the aldermen from the ward, drive down a tree-lined street and pull over in front of the first of the two dozen wood-frame duplex houses on the block. A pair of blond pre-school kids on the sidewalk study the car with undisguised suspicion. It’s a badly used, gray Datsun station wagon cluttered inside with month-old newspapers, McDonald’s wrappers, Coke cans, milkshake containers, a basketball. It’s a vehicle more like the second car of harried suburban parents than the only car of an extremely successful young politician, the unmarried, 44-year-old, three-time mayor of the state’s largest and most cosmopolitan city.

Sanders gets quickly out and heads for the front porch of the apartment on the left, passing the grim kids as if they weren’t there, while Thabault, the alderman, a trim, mild-looking man in his mid-30s in shirtsleeves and carrying a clipboard and pad, hurries to catch up. The mayor is all business, knocking brusquely at the screened door. He’s a tall man, well over six feet, but slightly stooped, not so much bent by the burdens of life as poised in careful preparation to spring, like a tennis player waiting for the serve. His tangled, prematurely gray hair is unfashionably long and looks permanently uncombed. He wears thick glasses of the plastic horn-rimmed variety preferred by serious graduate students in the 1950s, a striped short-sleeved shirt with the tail flapping over the baggy seat of dark brown corduroy trousers. His shoes are the kind of orange, moccasin-toed work shoes made in Taiwan and sold at K-Mart. On the basis of appearance alone, Alderman Thabault looks more like the mayor than the mayor, while the mayor looks like a maverick in an eastern-university philosophy department who persists in embarrassing his colleagues, making them wish they’d never tenured him.

Emerging from the darkness of the rooms beyond, a young woman suddenly appears at the door and says to Sanders, “Oh, hi!” as if to an old friend dropping by for a beer. She has the same pale, almost pink, blond hair as the kids on the sidewalk, and she’s extremely pregnant.

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