The United States has been engaged in what the great historian Charles A. Beard called "perpetual war for perpetual peace." The Federation of American Scientists has catalogued nearly 200 military incursions since 1945 in which the United States has been the aggressor. In a series of penetrating and alarming essays, whose centerpiece is a commentary on the events of September 11, 2001 (deemed unpublishable in this country until now) Gore Vidal challenges the comforting consensus following both September 11th and Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City: these were simply the acts of "evil-doers." "None of these explanations made much sense, but our rulers for more than half a century have made sure that we are never to be told the truth about anything that our government has done to other people, not to mention our own. That our ruling junta might have seriously provoked McVeigh and Osama was never dealt with. We consumers don't need to be told the why of anything. Certainly those of us who are in the why-business have a difficult time in getting through the corporate-sponsored American media, so I thought it useful to describe here the various provocations on our side that drove both bin Laden and McVeigh to such terrible acts." "The awesome physical damage Osama and company did us is as nothing compared to the knock-out blow to our vanishing liberties: the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1991 combined with the recent request to Congress for additional special powers to wiretap without judicial order; to deport lawful permanent residents, visitors and undocumented immigrants without due process." Could it be that the greatest victim of the September 11th terror attackswill be American liberty?"Once alienated, " Vidal writes, "an 'unalienable right' is apt to be forever lost." Gore Vidal is the author of twenty-two novels, five plays, many screenplays, more than two hundred essays, and a memoir. The Times Literary Supplement (U.K.) noted that Vidal's "United States (Essays 1952-92) is one of the great American books of the twentieth century." It won the 1993 National Book Award."Gore Vidal is the master essayist of our age." Washington Post "Our greatest living man of letters." -- Boston Globe"Vidal's imagination of American politics is so powerful as to compel awe." Harold Bloom, New York Review of Books

Gore Vidal was one of America's greatest and most controversial writers. The author of twenty-three novels, five plays, three memoirs, numerous screenplays and short stories, and well over two hundred essays, he received the National Book Award in 1993.In 1953, Vidal had already begun writing the works that would launch him to the top ranks of American authors and intellectuals. But in the wake of criticism for the scandalous content of his third novel, The City and the Pillar, Vidal turned to writing crime fiction under pseudonyms: three books as "Edgar Box" and one as "Cameron Kay." The Edgar Box novels were subsequently republished under his real name. The Cameron Kay never was.Lost for more than 60 years and overflowing with political and sexual intrigue, Thieves Fall Out provides a delicious glimpse into the mind of Gore Vidal in his formative years. By turns mischievous and deadly serious, Vidal tells the story of a man caught up in events bigger than he is, a down-on-his-luck American hired to smuggle an ancient relic out of Cairo at a time when revolution is brewing and heads are about to roll.One part Casablanca and one part torn-from-the-headlines tabloid reportage, this novel also offers a startling glimpse of Egypt in turmoil - written over half a century ago, but as current as the news streaming from the streets of Cairo today.

This is the fascinating autobiography of a society heiress who became the bohemian doyenne of the art world. Written in her own words it is the frank and outspoken story of her life and loves: her stormy relationships with such men as Max Ernst and Jackson Pollock, and her discovery of new artists. Known as 'the mistress of modern art', Peggy Guggenheim was a passionate collector and major patron. She amassed one of the most important collections of early twentieth-century European and American art embracing Cubism, Surrealism and Expressionism. A must-read for anyone with an interest in these major-league artists, this seminal period of art history, and the ultimate self-invented woman. Includes a foreword by Gore Vidal.

"The essential American form of expression."—from the Introduction by Jay Parini

From Mary Rowlandson's story of her capture by Indians in the mid-seventeenth century to Mary Paik Lee's story of being a pioneer Korean woman in America at the beginning of the twentieth century, the autobiographical form has provided our most vivid, intimate glimpses of daily American life and self-understanding.

In this groundbreaking anthology, respected writer and critic Jay Parini brings together an abundant selection from over three centuries of "the democratic voice . . . discovering itself." Here are the voices of the Founding Fathers and African American slaves; of transcendentalists and suffragists; of ancestors such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Mark Twain, Henry James, Helen Keller, Zora Neale Hurston, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin, and many others; and of a wide range of contemporaries, including Maxine Hong Kingston, Gore Vidal, Julia Alvarez, and Mark Doty.

The rich, continuous influence of autobiographical writing in our culture is clear, and as memoirs continue to fascinate readers, this invaluable anthology provides an essential guide to our foremost American literary tradition.

A literary "cause celebre" when first published more than fifty years ago, Gore Vidal's now-classic The City and the Pillar stands as a landmark novel of the gay experience.
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 devastating climax. The first novel of its kind to appear on the American literary landscape, The City and the Pillar" "remains a forthright and uncompromising portrayal of sexual relationships between men.

In a witty and elegant autobiography that takes up where his bestelling "Palimpsest" left off, the celebrated novelist, essayist, critic, and controversialist Gore Vidal reflects on his remarkable life.
Writing from his desks in Ravello and the Hollywood Hills, Vidal travels in memory through the arenas of literature, television, film, theatre, politics, and international society where he has cut a wide swath, recounting achievements and defeats, friends and enemies made (and sometimes lost). From encounters with, amongst others, Jack and Jacqueline Kennedy, Tennessee Williams, Eleanor Roosevelt, Orson Welles, Johnny Carson, Francis Ford Coppola to the mournful passing of his longtime partner, Howard Auster, Vidal always steers his narrative with grace and flair. Entertaining, provocative, and often moving, "Point to Point Navigation" wonderfully captures the life of one of twentieth-century America's most important writers.

Gore Vidal's reputation as America's finest essayist is an enduring one. This collection, chosen by the author from 40 years of work, contains about two-thirds of what he published in various magazines and journals. He has divided the essays into three categories, or states. State of the art covers literature, including novelists and critics, bestsellers, pieces on Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Suetonius, Nabakov and Montaigne (a previosly uncollected essay from 1992). State of the union deals with politics and public life: sex, drugs, money, Abraham Lincoln, Eleanor Roosevelt, The Holy Family (his essay on the Kennedys), Nixon, and finally Monotheism and its Discontents , a scathing critique of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. In state of being, we are given personal responses to people and events: recollections of his childhood, E. Nesbit, Tarzan, Tennessee Williams and Anais Nin.

Jim Willard, former high-school athlete and clean-cut boy-next-door-, is haunted by the memory of a romanctic adolescent encounter with his friend Bob Ford. As Jim pursues his first love, in awe of the very same masculinity he possesses himself, his progresss through the secret gay world of 1940's America unveils surreptitious Hollywood affairs, the hidden life of the military in the Second World War and the underworld bar culture of New York City. With the publication of his daring thrid novel The City and the Pillar in 1948, Gore Vidal shocked the American public, which has just begun to hail him as their newest and brightest young writer. It remains not only an authentic and profoundly importatnt social document but also a serious exploration of the nature of idealistic love.

In the hazardous fictional terrain of his historical novels, Gore Vidal is never especially kind to American history in general, or to its icons in particular. Yet in this brilliantly realised study of Abraham Lincoln, he paints a surprising and near-heroic picture of the man who led America through four of the most divisive and dangerous years of the nation’s history. Observed alternately by his loved ones, his rivals and his future assassins, Lincoln at first appears as an inept and naïve backwoods lawyer. People in this novel are not averse to turning up, getting drunk, and regaling the reader with details of Lincoln’s whoring activities and his seemingly inexhaustible supply of folksy stories. Yet gradually Lincoln the towering leader of deep vision emerges in a Washington engulfed by fear, greed and the horrors of the Civil War. Lincoln’s loving but mentally decomposing wife, his view from the White House on slavery and America’s bloodiest war, and his own, fierce personal ambition: all are portrayed with a vibrancy and an urgency that almost belies what they have now become ? history itself.
 

Here is the story of arguably America’s finest hour; of the time when the twentieth century dawned, Queen Victoria died, and America, basking deliciously in excess wealth, rather thought it might snap up an empire of its own. Yet while politicians muse over the potential of China or the Philippines – even Russia – empires are being built at home; railway empires; industrial empires; newspaper empires. Into this arena float the delectable Caroline Sanford, putative heiress and definite catch. Caroline is an oddity; she has been raised in France where they teach rich girls to talk and think. American society women, required only to think of themselves as the most interesting beings on earth, are rather alarmed. American men are amused – until Caroline shirks from marriage, sues her brother, buys a newspaper, and becomes that even greater oddity – a powerful woman. Mingling with the movers and shakers of the day – with President McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William Randolf Hearst, Henry James, the Astors, Vanderbilts and Whitneys – Caroline Sanford echoes the glorious passage of the United States as it sweeps into a new century, reaching boldly for the world.
 

Vidal's historical novel set in the 5th century BC and narrated by Cyrus Spitama, son of a Persian prince and Greek sorceress, grandson of the prophet Zoroaster, and ambassador to the courts of India, China and Greece. Pericles, Thucydides, Sophocles and Confucius are among the book's characters.

"Mr. Vidal demonstrates a political imagination and insider's sagacity equaled by no other practicing fiction writer I can think of. And like the earlier novels in his historical cycle, Empire is a wonderfully vivid documentary drama." —The New York Times Book Review

In this extraordinarily powerful epic Gore Vidal recreates America's Gilded Age—a period of promise and possibility, of empire-building and fierce political rivalries. In a vivid and beathtaking 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.


From the Paperback edition.

Gore Vidal's Narratives of Empire series spans the history of the United States from the Revolution to the post-World War II years. With their broad canvas and large cast of fictional and historical characters, the novels in this series present a panorama of the American political and imperial experience as interpreted by one of its most worldly, knowing, and ironic observers.

Burr is 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. As his amanuensis, he chooses Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler, a young New York City journalist, and together they explore both Burr's past and the continuing political intrigues of the still young United States.

Gore Vidal, one of the master stylists of American literature and one of the most acute observers of American life and history, turns his immense literary and historiographic talent to a portrait of the formidable trio of George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson.
In "Inventing a Nation, "Vidal transports the reader into the minds, the living rooms (and bedrooms), the convention halls, and the salons of Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and others. We come to know these men, through Vidal's splendid and percipient prose, in ways we have not up to now--their opinions of each other, their worries about money, their concerns about creating a viable democracy. Vidal brings them to life at the key moments of decision in the birthing of our nation. He also illuminates the force and weight of the documents they wrote, the speeches they delivered, and the institutions of government by which we still live. More than two centuries later, America is still largely governed by the ideas championed by this triumvirate.
"Pure Vidal. . . . "Inventing a Nation" is his edgy tribute to the way we were before the fall."--"Los Angeles Times Book Review "
" Vidal offers] details that enliven and . . . reflections on the past that point sharply to today." --Richard Eder, "New York Times "
"An engaging and] . . . unblinking view of our national heroes by one who cherishes them, warts and all."--Edmund S. Morgan, "New York Review of Books"
" Vidal's] quick wit flickers over the canonical tale of our republic's founding, turning it into a dark and deliciously nuanced comedy of men, manners, and ideas."--Amanda Heller, "Boston Sunday Globe"
"This entertaining and enlightening reappraisal of the Founders is a must for buffs of American civilization and its discontents."--"Booklist"
"Gore Vidal . . . still understands American history backwards and forwards as few writers ever have."--David Kipen, "National Public Radio"

A sweeping novel of politics, war, philosophy, and adventure–in a restored edition, featuring never-before-published material from Gore Vidal’s original manuscript–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.

In 1804, Colonel Aaron Burr, Vice-President of the United States, shot and killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel. Three years later, on the order of President Thomas Jefferson, he was tried for treason: for plotting to dismember the United States. Gore Vidal, romping iconoclastically through American history, debunks, in this historical novel of Burr’s life, the common and casually held notion of the man as a scoundrel and an adventurer. Instead he appears as one of the ‘host of choice spirits’ forced to live among coarse, materialistic, hypocritical people ? among them Jefferson and Hamilton. Here, the latter appears as a power-hungry ‘parvenu’ from the West Indies and the former as a semi-literate slave-owning tyrant. American politics, suggests Vidal, had a penchant for the vulgar. Even then. Veering backwards to the revolution and the early days of the republic, stopping at dinner-parties on the way, and reaching forward to the future, BURR is a novel about treason, both the particular and in general. For what, asks Vidal, really belongs to whom? What properly belongs to the Constitution, to the nation, to the family ?even, intriguingly, to novelists and historians?
 

It is a risky (and risque) business becoming 'Woman Triumphant' - exercising total power over men like Rusty Godowski. Rusty just wants to be a Hollywood star like everyone else at Buck Loner's academy, but now that Buck's niece, Myra Breckinridge, has arrived, the curriculum is taking a wildly strange turn. Willing to risk all to be superb and unique, Myra means to prove to her old friend Dr Montag that it is possible to work out in life all one's fantasies - and survive. 'From Myra's fist appearnce on the page she was a megastar', explains her creator, Gore Vidal. Myra caused a second furore when she returned in Myron to battle it out with her eponymous alter ego, a drab little man fallen into marriage and a job in Chinese catering. Theirs is a contest of hormonal roulette, with glorious Myra off on time-travelling missions of mercy back to 1948 to try to change cinema history and to introduce her own radical theories of popuation control. Meanwhile Myron tries desperately to stay in the present as inconspicuously as Mrya will allow.

Imagined by one of the world's foremost JFK scholars, this fictionalised conversation presents the essential biography of America's most glamorous and mythologised president. For many, the presidency of John F. Kennedy was a magic interlude in American history. His admirers saw him as a leader of intelligence and imagination, who wielded power with grace, courage and verve - although detractors have questioned the depth of his convictions and drawn attention to his serial philandering. Kennedy's rise also marked the beginning of modern "celebrity" politics - a politician with film star charisma who proved ideally suited to the new age of television. Meet the man himself and he'll tell you how it felt to have his finger on the red button when the world teetered on the brink of nuclear war. The book is divided into two parts: a biographical essay that provides a concise overview of JFK's life, achievements, scandals and controversies; and a Q&A dialogue based on rigorous research and incorporating JFK's actual spoken or written words whenever possible, along with rigorously researched biographical interpretations of his various views and positions. Here you will find all the key moments in JFK's life and career: his early days at Harvard and the US Navy; his family background and the importance of his Catholic faith; running for office against Richard Nixon; his clashes with communist power in Berlin and Cuba; the Civil Rights movement; Vietnam; and the president's often scandalous personal life that was carefully concealed from an adoring public. Kennedy's assassination on 22 November 1963 marked the beginning of a tumultuous and bitterly divided decade, and birthed countless conspiracy theories that thrive to this day. These legacies of polarisation and suspicion of established authority have assumed particular salience in the 21st century.

The United States has been engaged in what the great historian Charles A. Beard called "perpetual war for perpetual peace." The Federation of American Scientists has cataloged nearly 200 military incursions since 1945 in which the United States has been the aggressor. In a series of penetrating and alarming essays, whose centerpiece is a commentary on the events of September 11, 2001 (deemed too controversial to publish in this country until now) Gore Vidal challenges the comforting consensus following September 11th and goes back and draws connections to Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. He asks were these simply the acts of "evil-doers?" "Gore Vidal is the master essayist of our age." -- Washington Post "Our greatest living man of letters."--Boston Globe "Vidal's imagination of American politics is so powerful as to compel awe."--Harold Bloom, The New York Review of Books

* I exist to say, 'No, that isn't the way it is, ' or 'What you believe to be true is not true for the following reasons.' I am a master of the obvious. I mean, if there's a hole in the road, I will, viciously, outrageously, say there's a hole in the road and if you don't fill it in you'll break the axle of your car. One is not loved for being helpful.
Gore Vidal, one of America's foremost essayists, screenwriters, and novelists, died July 31, 2012. He was, in addition, a terrific conversationalist. Dick Cavett once described him as the best talker since Oscar Wilde. And Vidal was never more eloquent, or caustic, than when let loose on his favorite topic, the history and politics of the United States.
This book is made up from four interviews conducted with his long-time interlocutor, the writer and radio host Jon Wiener, in which Vidal grapples with matters evidently close to his heart: the history of the American Empire, the rise of the National Security State, and his own life in politics, both as a commentator and candidate.
The interviews cover a twenty-year span, from 1988 to 2008, when Vidal was at the height of his powers. His extraordinary facility for developing an argument, tracing connections between past and present, and drawing on an encyclopedic knowledge of America's place in the world, are all on full display. And, of course, it being Gore Vidal, an ample sprinkling of gloriously acerbic one-liners is also provided.