Synopses & Reviews
Gore Vidalnovelist, playwright, critic, screenwriter, memoirist, indefatigable political commentator, and controversialistis 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.
This long-needed volume comprises some twenty-four of his best-loved pieces of criticism, political commentary, memoir, portraiture, and, occasionally, unfettered score settling. It will stand as one of the most enjoyable and durable works from the hand and mind of this vastly accomplished and entertaining immortal of American literature.
About the Author
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.Jay Parini (born 1948) is an American writer and academic. Among his works of fiction and criticism are The Last Station, John Steinbeck, and Benjamin's Crossing. Parini is Gore Vidal's literary executor and a regular contributor to various journals and newspapers, including The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Guardian (U.K.). In 1976, he cofounded New England Review, and he has taught at Middlebury College since 1982. He lives in Vermont.
Table of Contents
Introduction by Jay Parini
PART ONE: READING THE WRITERS
Novelists and Critics of the 1940s (1953)
Tarzan Revisited (1963)
The Top Ten Best-Sellers According to the Sunday: New York Times as of January 7, 1973 (1973)
French Letters: Theories of the New Novel (1967)
American Plastic: The Matter of Fiction (1974)
Calvino's Novels (1974)
The Hacks of Academe (1976)
Some Memories of the Glorious Bird and an Earlier Self (1976)
Edmund Wilson: This Critic and This Gin and These Shoes (1980)
William Dean Howells (1983)
Dawn Powell: The American Writer (1987)
Montaigne (1992)
Rabbit's Own Burrow (1996)
PART TWO: READING THE WORLD
Passage to Egypt (1963)
Pornography (1966)
The Holy Family (1967)
Homage to Daniel Shays (1972)
Pink Triangle and Yellow Star (1981)
Theodore Roosevelt: An American Sissy (1981)
The Second American Revolution (1981)
The National Security State (1988)
Monotheism and Its Dicontents (1992)
Black Tuesday (2002)
State of the Union, (2004)