Gore Vidal, prevailing American superstitions, and the public critic's rhetorical obligations -- Gore Vidal's Selected Essays On Gore Vidal's essays as political actions: Without ever saying so, Vidal also manages to suggest that everything is political, though in a very different, non-postmodern sense.
Gore Vidal's sequence of novels that sprawl across the young American republic's two centuries plus of existenceBurr, Lincoln, 1876, Empire, Hollywood, Washington, and The Golden Agein my estimation are amongst the greatest series of historical novels ever written; and United States is surely one of the finest collections of essays by undoubtedly one of the greatest essayists that America has.
Gore Vidal was born in 1925 at the United States Military Academy at West Point.His first novel, Williwaw, written when he was nineteen years old and serving in the Army, appeared in the spring of 1946.Since then he has written twenty-three novels, five plays, many screenplays, short stories, well over two hundred essays, and a memoir.
About Selected Essays of Gore Vidal. Gore Vidal—novelist, playwright, critic, screenwriter, memoirist, indefatigable political commentator, and controversialist—is America’s premier man of letters. No other living writer brings more sparkling wit, vast learning, indelible personality, and provocative mirth to the job of writing an essay.
Gore Vidal is one of America’s most pugnacious, intelligent and politically engaged living essayists, but until now, the only book of his selected essays one could readily buy was United States, a 1,300-page compendium the size of a New York City phone book.This handier volume, neatly organized by Vidal’s literary executor, Jay Parini, ought to make introductions to the writer’s best.
I recently paid a solemn and respectful visit to Gore Vidal’s grave. It is to be found in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington. You take a few paces down the slope from the graveyard’s centrepiece, which is the lachrymose and androgynous Mourning Figure sculpted by August St Guldens for Henry Adams’s unhappy wife Clover (whose name always puts me in mind of an overworked pit pony).
The Last Empire is Gore Vidal's ninth collection of essays in the course of his distinguished literary career. Vidal displays unparalleled range and inimitable style as he offers incisive observations about terrorism, civil liberties, the CIA, Al Gore, Tony Blair, and the Clintons, interwoven with a rich tapestry of personal anecdote, critical insight, and historical detail.