1876 (Modern Library) - Tapa dura

Returning to America after his long European sojourn, Charlie Schuyler, Aaron Burr's unacknowledged son, and Charlie's widowed daughter seek financial and political advancement in the centennial power centers, as republican idealism is giving way to imperial expediency

The third volume of Gore Vidal's magnificent series of historical novels aimed at demythologizing the American past, 1876 chronicles the political scandals and dark intrigues that rocked the United States in its centennial year.
------Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler, Aaron Burr's unacknowledged son, returns to a flamboyant America after his long, self-imposed European exile. The narrator of Burr has come home to recoup a lost fortune by arranging a suitable marriage for his beautiful daughter, the widowed Princess d'Agrigente, and by ingratiating himself with Samuel Tilden, the favored presidential candidate in the centennial year. With these ambitions and with their own abundant charms, Schuyler and his daughter soon find themselves at the centers of American social and political power at a time when the fading ideals of the young republic were being replaced by the excitement of empire.
------"A glorious piece of writing," said Jimmy Bre