Friday Fiction: Gore Vidal

--by Hanje Richards
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Eugene Luther Gore Vidal (born October 3, 1925) is an American author, playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and political activist. Early in his career, he wrote The City and the Pillar (1948), which outraged mainstream critics as one of the first major American novels to deal directly with the subject of homosexuality. He subsequently emerged as one of America's most important literary figures due to the enormous quantity and quality of work produced over the course of his career, including novels, essays, plays, and short stories covering a wide variety of topics and eras. He also ran for political office twice and served as a longtime political critic.

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Burr - A portrait of perhaps the most complex and misunderstood of the Founding Fathers. In 1804, while serving as vice president, Aaron Burr fought a duel with his political nemesis, Alexander Hamilton, and killed him. In 1807, he was arrested, tried, and acquitted of treason. In 1833, Burr is newly married, an aging statesman considered a monster by many. Burr retains much of his political influence if not the respect of all. And he is determined to tell his own story.

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City and the Pillar - Jim, a handsome, all-American athlete, has always been shy around girls. But when he and his best friend, Bob, partake in “awful kid stuff,” the experience forms Jim’s ideal of spiritual completion. Defying his parents’ expectations, Jim strikes out on his own, hoping to find Bob and rekindle their amorous friendship. Along the way he struggles with what he feels is his unique bond with Bob and with his persistent attraction to other men. Upon finally encountering Bob years later, the force of his hopes for a life together leads to a shattering conclusion.

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Creation - Offers a captivating grand tour of the ancient world. Cyrus Spitama, grandson of the prophet Zoroaster and lifelong friend of Xerxes, spent most of his life as Persian ambassador for the great king Darius. He traveled to India, where he discussed nirvana with Buddha, and to the warring states of Cathay, where he learned of Tao from Master Li and fished on the riverbank with Confucius. Now blind and aged in Athens – the Athens of Pericles, Sophocles, Thucydides, Herodotus, and Socrates – Cyrus recounts his days as he strives to resolve the fundamental questions that have guided his life’s journeys: how the universe was created, and why evil was created with good. In revisiting the fifth century B.C. – one of the most spectacular periods in history – Gore Vidal illuminates the ideas that have shaped civilizations for millennia.

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1876 - The centennial of the United States was celebrated with great fanfare – fireworks, exhibitions, pious calls to patriotism, and perhaps the most underhanded political machination in the country's history: the theft of the presidency from Samuel Tilden in favor of Rutherford B. Hayes. This was the Gilded Age, when robber barons held the purse strings of the nation, and the party in power was determined to stay in power. Gore Vidal's 1876 gives us the news of the day through the eyes of Charlie Schuyler, who has returned from exile to regain a lost fortune and arrange a marriage into New York society for his widowed daughter. And although Tammany Hall has faltered and Boss Tweed has fled, the effects of corruption reach deep, even into Schuyler's own family.

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Empire - America's Gilded Age – a period of promise and possibility, of empire-building and fierce political rivalries. In a vivid and breathtaking work of fiction, where the fortunes of a sister and brother intertwine with the fates of the generation, their country, and some of the greatest names of their day, including President McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan, William and Henry James, the Astors, the Vanderbilts, and the Whitneys, Gore Vidal sweeps us from the nineteenth century into the twentieth, from the salvaged republic of Lincoln to a nation boldly reaching for the world.

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Golden Age - Covers the period from 1939 to the end of the Korean War, with a brief coda set in the present and Vidal himself serving as the narrator. At the cusp of World War II, Roosevelt is plotting his own reelection to an unprecedented third term and looking for a way to insure popular support for American involvement in the fight against Hitler. Once again, a descendant of Aaron Burr finds himself at the center of the political, social, and, to a lesser extent, cultural whirl. With the right family connections to gain him entry into the portals of power and the literary abilities that allow him to found a successful magazine of commentary, Peter Sanford cynically observes as F.D.R. maneuvers us into war and as Truman the haberdasher digs in against the "Communist menace." The novel is replete with a lively cast of both real and imagined characters and exhibits the typical Vidal wit and erudition.

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Hollywood: A Novel of America in the 1920s - The time is 1917. In Washington, President Wilson is about to lead the United States into the Great War. In California, a new industry is born that will transform America: moving pictures. Here is history as only Gore Vidal can re-create it: brimming with intrigue and scandal, peopled by the greats of the silver screen and American politics, from Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks to Franklin D. Roosevelt and the author's own grandfather, the blind Senator Gore.

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Julian - Julian the Apostate, nephew of Constantine the Great, was one of the brightest yet briefest lights in the history of the Roman Empire. A military genius on the level of Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great, a graceful and persuasive essayist, and a philosopher devoted to worshiping the gods of Hellenism, he became embroiled in a fierce intellectual war with Christianity that provoked his murder at the age of thirty-two, only four years into his brilliantly humane and compassionate reign. A marvelously imaginative and insightful novel of classical antiquity, Julian captures the religious and political ferment of a desperate age and restores with blazing wit and vigor the legacy of an impassioned ruler.

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Kalki - To satisfy a public that longs for a savior, Vidal's eponymous hero of Kalki, born and bred in America's Midwest, establishes himself in Nepal, puts out the word that he is the last incarnation of the god Vishnu, and predicts an imminent apocalypse meant to cleanse the planet. Who is Kalki, and why is he planning to destroy the world – and everything in it? And if Kalki is a mystical legend, then why does his ultimate world include only a select few chosen to breed a new human race?

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Lincoln - To most Americans, Abraham Lincoln is a monolithic figure, the Great Emancipator and Savior of the Union, beloved by all. In Gore Vidal's Lincoln we meet Lincoln the man and Lincoln the political animal, the president who entered a besieged capital where most of the population supported the South and where even those favoring the Union had serious doubts that the man from Illinois could save it. Far from steadfast in his abhorrence of slavery, Lincoln agonizes over the best course of action and comes to his great decision only when all else seems to fail. As the Civil War ravages his nation, Lincoln must face deep personal turmoil, the loss of his dearest son, and the harangues of a wife seen as a traitor for her Southern connections.

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Live From Golgotha: The Gospel According to Gore Vidal - Twentieth-century television networks compete murderously for exclusive rights to broadcast the Crucifixion, in an irreverent assault on religious, sexual, and commercial mores.