gore vidal united states essays pdf

Two Score of Gore Date: June 20, 1993, Sunday, Late Edition - Final Byline: By R. W. B. Lewis; Lead: UNITED STATES Essays 1952 - 1992 . By Gore Vidal . 1,295 pp. New York: Random House. $37.50. Text: THIS gigantic volume brings together essays and articles written by Gore Vidal over 40 years, interspersed as it were between his novel writing (23 novels to date, including the acclaimed fictional biography of America: "Lincoln," "1876," "Empire" and so on), playwriting ("Visit to a Small Planet" and "The Best Man") and sundry television and screenwriting chores. As an older colleague once said to me about a wondrously energetic younger man, "He writes faster than I can read." "United States: Essays 1952-1992" divides into three parts, or "states" -- literature, the public world, the personal life -- and there are 114 pieces in all, some of them full-scale appraisals, always beautifully informed, of the author or topic in question. The book's title suggests Mr. Vidal's hope that united they may all stand. They mostly will, especially as animated by Mr. Vidal's sweeping, grasping prose style, with its mix of the elegant and the wittily vernacular. Within the literary component, we are given articles examining English writers from Thomas Love Peacock and George Meredith down through Christopher Isherwood and V. S. Pritchett (who is rightly and acutely praised as a critic). It is impossible to think of another American observer so intimately acquainted with the English world of letters and its tradition (Peacock's "novel-as-dialogue" even exerted an influence on the novelist Vidal, as Mr. Vidal acknowledges, of "The Judgment of Paris," in his own respectful review of a 1968 scholarly book called "Gore Vidal"). The American literati considered here are a much more varied lot. There is a splendid and welcome essay on Fredric Prokosch, reminding us of the power and productivity of this shamefully neglected self-exiled (to the south of France) writer, the author of, among other books, "The Seven Who Fled" in 1937 (about European escapees on the run from a disintegrating Tashkent). There are amiable jostlings with Norman Mailer (and his "nice but small gift for self-destruction") and thoughtful glances at John O'Hara, Paul Bowles and Henry Miller, along with Mr. Vidal's attention-seizing diatribes in the 1970's against best-selling novels, the New Novel (John Barth, Thomas Pynchon et al., most of whom, in my view, Mr. Vidal misreads), academic critical theorists far and wide (back on target) and the nonreading or wrong-reading American public. At the heart of the American literary section is an assessment of the social novel as very differently practiced by Henry James, William Dean Howells, Dawn Powell and Louis Auchincloss. If Mr. Vidal is expert on Henry James, especially on a collection of his book reviews, he is better than that on Howells. In fact, the long essay on Howells, occasioned by a Library of America volume of his fiction, is probably the most substantial and searching discussion of that writer, and the soundest in its judgment, yet written. It begins with Howells's open letter to The New York Tribune in 1886, vigorously protesting the unjust condemnation to death of seven persons following the Haymarket Street riots in Chicago -- the only one of "the Republic's major literary and intellectual figures," Mr. Vidal emphasizes, who "took a public stand." It continues through a shrewd tracing of Howells's entire career and exemplary readings of such Howells novels as "A Modern Instance" and "Indian Summer." As to Dawn Powell, a longtime resident of Greenwich Village (she died there in 1965) and the author of such should-be-classic stories of the provincial amid the anarchy and charm of New York City as "The Wicked Pavilion" and "The Golden Spur," Mr. Vidal follows Edmund Wilson in a vain attempt to establish her name and her achievement. About Louis Auchincloss, Mr. Vidal remarks accurately that he is the only fiction writer in the country who tells us how "our rulers" actually behave in their board rooms and law offices and clubs; and that by betraying his patrician class and forging his own literary tradition (mostly Henry James and Edith Wharton), Mr. Auchincloss has created a unique place for himself. Exploring the public scene, Mr. Vidal writes luminously about Presidential families -- the Adamses, the Roosevelts, the Kennedys -- unintentionally, no doubt, giving the impression that he is somehow related to all of them, at least by marriage. He evinces an attractively personal admiration and affection for Eleanor Roosevelt (she "never stopped believing" that the wrongs of human society "can be put right by human action"); and he refers repeatedly to Ronald Reagan, with casual wit, as "the Acting President." We are provided with a full display of Mr. Vidal's social and political opinions. The moment I salute most warmly is his memory (and ours) of a televised "live chat" with William F. Buckley Jr. at the Republican National Convention in 1968, when Mr. Vidal, as he says, "came close to revealing what I really am: a dedicated anti-anti-Communist." Say it again. Even more stirring are the half-dozen pieces, about a hundred pages altogether, addressed to the whole matter of sex, law and politics -- more generally sexuality and cultural mores, with the main stress on homosexuality, or in Mr. Vidal's preferred phrase same-sex sex. In this area Mr. Vidal writes more intelligently, knowingly, angrily, compassionately, entertainingly and downright smartly than anyone else around. There is a book about homosexuality and the American temperament embedded in "United States," and the centerpiece of it would be his 1981 article in The Nation about the soul-shriveling prejudice of the evangelical right and its kin against gays and Jews ("Pink Triangle and Yellow Star"). Included in such a book would be Mr. Vidal's tender memories of Tennessee Williams and other gay writer friends (with a note reporting Mr. Vidal's rejection of the word "gay" as "a ridiculous word to use as a common identification for Frederick the Great, Franklin Pangborn and Eleanor Roosevelt"). IN the shorter third section, Mr. Vidal escorts us through reminiscences of West Point, where his father was the first aviation instructor (hence also Mr. Vidal's fascinating follow-up discourse "On Flying") and where he was born in 1925; of television and theater writing; of life in Hollywood and Italy. Here and elsewhere Mr. Vidal evokes his association with Italo Calvino, the supremely gifted and extraordinarily engaging Italian writer, upon whose death at 61 in 1985 "Italy went into mourning, as if a beloved prince had died." Mr. Vidal attended Calvino's funeral on a rainy hillside not far from his own long-established home at Ravello, south of Naples. It has to be said that this collection is a good deal too long. A number of the pieces were really not worth reprinting: for example, the silly put-down, in the arch voice of a women's-club speaker, of Robert Penn Warren's novel "Band of Angels." It is hardly one of Warren's best, but it and he deserve better than this kind of campy snickering. Mr. Vidal's often headlong pace of thought and expression can lead him into bizarre generalizations, as when he identifies "the main purpose of literary biography" in our time as being "the Life as opposed to the Work." I think of Richard Ellmann, Leon Edel, Ernest Samuels and other biographers who endlessly intermesh the Work with the Life and wonder what on earth Mr. Vidal is talking about. Over all, 1,200-plus pages of Mr. Vidal take a toll; I couldn't help recalling Alice Gibbens James's comment in a letter to her husband, William, about the aftereffect of a long evening's conversation with brother Henry. "Very pleasant," she said, "but leaving a curious lassitude behind." But Alice quickly added: "And he is so good!" Likewise Gore Vidal, essayist; so good that we cannot do without him. He is a treasure of state.

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United States: Essays, 1952–1992. By Gore Vidal. (New York: Random, 1993. x, 1,295 pp. $37.50, ISBN 0-679-41489-4.)

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Richard Pells, United States: Essays, 1952–1992. By Gore Vidal. (New York: Random, 1993. x, 1,295 pp. $37.50, ISBN 0-679-41489-4.), Journal of American History , Volume 81, Issue 2, September 1994, Pages 806–807, https://doi.org/10.2307/2081393

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United States: Essays 1952-1992 Audio CD – Unabridged, December 31, 2019

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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.

• Language English
• Publisher Brilliance Audio
• Publication date December 31, 2019
• Dimensions 5.75 x 0.7 x 6.25 inches
• ISBN-10 1543696163
• ISBN-13 978-1543696165
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Brilliance Audio; Unabridged edition (December 31, 2019)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1543696163
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1543696165
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.11 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.75 x 0.7 x 6.25 inches

About the author

Gore Vidal has received the National Book Award, written numerous novels, short stories, plays and essays. He has been a political activist and as Democratic candidate for Congress from upstate New York, he received the most votes of any Democrat in a half-century.

Photo by David Shankbone (Photographer's blog post about the photo and event) [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

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