The Essential Gore Vidal (Old West) Book

Gore Vidal is one of the intellectual heroes of our time. A novelist who has made ideas work as the driving force of powerful satiric and historical fictions: a critic whose deliberately reactionary standpoint expresses itself mordantly and with real sensitivity to style: a memoirist with a capacity to show us how the great actually were--Vidal has been all of these things, with grace and a delightful arrogance. Born to the political classes, he conscientiously destroyed his chance of a serious political career by writing one of the most open novels of gay life to appear in the 50s; a connection by marriage of the Kennedys, he made a point of distinguishing his politics from theirs. He has gone on being rambunctious and difficult in his polemical prose and his fiction into a disrespectful old age--this selection from the essays and the novels covers a lot of ground and does so with a minimum of editorial nagging. In these pages pagan emperors and the Buddha jostle spindoctors and transsexual film critics; arguments for minority alliances against the Republicans share space with tributes to Eleanor Roosevelt and Tennessee Williams. This is a useful introduction which covers Vidal's extraordinary range. --Roz KaveneyRead More