The Essential Gore Vidal : A Gore Vidal Reader

Nobody can accuse Gore Vidal of having narrow interests. The author of such diverse books as the historical novels Burr and Lincoln, the transgender satire Myra Breckinridge, and the imaginative religious epic Creation has one of the busiest--and most eclectic--intellects in literature today. A prolific novelist, Vidal has also enjoyed a career as playwright, essayist, and political commentator. In both fiction and nonfiction, Gore is mainly known for his cutting, satirical wit. Consider for example, this description from "Ronnie and Nancy: A Life in Pictures": "I first saw Ronnie and Nancy Reagan at the Republican convention of 1964 in San Francisco's Cow Palace. Ronnie and Nancy ... were seated in a box to one side of the central area where the cows--the delegates, that is--were whooping it up." But underneath the rapier verbiage is some serious food for thought. In an article about the Kennedys entitled "The Holy Family," Vidal concludes: "They create illusions and call them facts, and between what they are said to be and what they are falls the shadow of all the useful words not spoken, of all the actual deeds not done."

The Essential Gore Vidal includes excerpts from his finest novels, his play The Best Man, some of his early fiction, and his most memorable essays on subjects as variegated as homosexuality, feminism, and the writings of Thomas Love Peacock. Though not comprehensive, this volume does contain the cream of Vidal's output and makes for an excellent introduction to one of America's great men of letters. --Alix Wilber

Gore Vidal was born in 1925 at the United States Military Academy at West Point. His first novel, Williwaw, appeared in the spring of 1946, when he was nineteen years old and just out of the Army. Since then he has written twenty-two novels, five plays, many screenplays, short stories, well over two hundred essays, and a memoir.

Fred Kaplan is Distinguished Professor of English at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His books include Thomas Carlyle: A Biography; Charles Dickens: A Biography; and Henry James: The Imagination of a Genius.

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