Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere

What passes for political discussion in conventional circles rarely runs the gamut, even from A to B. To probe the deeper meanings of power requires inquiry beyond the vapidity of would-be Presidents, in Britain as well as the US. Fiction has traditionally been an alternative container for such ideas, sometimes a soapbox, sometimes a sanctuary, but always available and frequently used.

Many have seen the meeting between literature and politics as necessarily fraught. Norman Podhoretz examined the intersection under the rubric ?The Bloody Crossroads?. Christopher Hitchens, in this sparkling engagement with novels and their authors, pursues a different approach. Taking inspiration from Shelley's description of the poet as an ?unacknowledged legislator?, he shows that while the encounter between writers and those in power is not always smooth, it generally embodies a dialectic that is well worth pursuit.

Hitchens provides rich evidence that his own sallies as a political journalist, so effectively deployed with the publication of the best-selling No One Left to Lie To last year, are nourished by a close engagement with a broad sweep of novelists. Here Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal's encounters with American revolution are scrutinized in interview; George Orwell?s role as a fulcrum between left and right is carefully weighed; an appraisal of the fatwah issued against Salman Rushdie becomes a meditation on the West's misunderstood encounter with Islam; Ernest Hemingway is defended against the vagaries of fashion; and Hitchens?s delicious literary taste skips along a line from Oscar Wilde and P.G. Wodehouse, through Philip Larkin and Patrick O?Brian, to Walter Mosley,Tom Wolfe and Susan Sontag.

Many see the meeting between literature and politics as fraught. In this engagement with novels and their authors, Christopher Hitchens seeks to show that while the encounter between writers and those in power is not always smooth, it generally embodies a dialectic that is worth pursuit.

He is a loose cannon, a sharp wit, an ironist, a polemicist of exceptional talent, and editor's dream.

Hitchens provides rich evidence that his own sallies as a political journalist are nourished by a close engagement with a broad sweep of novelists.

A celebration of Percy Shelley's assertion that 'poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world', these thirty-plus essays on writers from Oscar Wilde to Salman Rushdie dispel the myth of politics as a stone tied to the neck of literature; Norman Podhoretz's 'bloody crossroads'. Instead Hitchens argues that when all parties in the state were agreed on a matter, it was the individual pens that created the space for a true moral argument.

Christopher Hitchens provides evidence that his own sallies as a political journalist are nourished by a close engagement with a broad sweep of novelists. Here, Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal's encounters with American revolution are scrutinised in interview; George Orwell's role as a fulcrum between left and right is carefully weighed-up; an appraisal of the fatwah issued against Salman Rushdie becomes a meditation on the West's misunderstood encounter with Islam; and Ernest Hemmingway is defended against the vagaries of fashion, as Hitchens turns an illuminating eye to lines from Oscar Wilde and P.G. Wodehouse, through Philip Larkin and Patrick O'Brien, to Walter Mosley, Tom Wolfe, Gore Vidal and Susan Sontag.

Christopher Hitchens is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and the author of the best-selling God Is Not Great. His books published by Verso include The Trial of Henry Kissinger, No One Left to Lie To, The Missionary Position, Unacknowledged Legislation, The Parthenon Marbles, Hostage to History, and more.