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 forays into criticism, reviewing, political commentary, memoir, portraiture, and, occasionally, unfettered score settling. Among them are such classics as "The Top Ten Best-Sellers," “Dawn Powell: The American Writer,” “Theodore Roosevelt: An American Sissy," "Pornography," and "The Second American Revolution.” Edited and introduced by Gore Vidal's literary executor, Jay Parini, 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.
Review
"In his essay about the top ten best-sellers on the New York Times fiction list of January 7, 1973, Gore Vidal gave a characteristically withering notice ("Tolstoi hangs over the work like a mushroom cloud") to Solzhenitsyn's August 1914. He finished with the remark, "I fear that the best one can say of Solzhenitsyn is gore vidal (a Russian phrase meaning 'he has seen grief')." I'd always taken this as a joke rather a below-par joke by Vidal's standards until I checked it out with my Russian housecleaner." Jonathan Raban, the New York Review of Books (read the entire New York Review of Books review)
About the Author
GORE VIDAL is the author of twenty-three novels, five plays, two memoirs, numerous screenplays and short stories, and well over two hundred essays. His
United States: Essays, 1952–
1992 received the National Book Award.
JAY PARINI, Vidal's literary executor, is the author of numerous works of fiction, biography, and nonfiction, including The Last Station and Gore Vidal: Writer Against the Grain.
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)