“Gore Vidal is America’s premier man of letters,” says Jay Parini in his introduction to The Selected Essays
of Gore Vidal, and if after reading Vidal on William Dean Howells,
Tennessee Williams, various dead Kennedys, and “American sissy” Theodore
Roosevelt the reader denies it—well, hie on back to the MFA prison.
The Selected Essays were written over the course of a half-century (1953-2004), or almost one-quarter of the lifespan of the Republic that is Vidal’s primary subject—though it might more accurately be said that Vidal has been a contumacious patriot of the Old Republic for nigh the entirety of the post-Republic era. As such, he is a man out of time in the United States of Amnesia, as he calls his native and beloved land.
What a pleasure these essays are. One imagines Gore Vidal at his writing desk, hint of a smile creasing his mouth as he mints Saint-Gaudens gold-piece witticisms with Lincoln-penny frequency. Here he is on Ohio’s greatest novelist: “For a writer, Howells himself was more than usually a dedicated hypochondriac whose adolescence was shadowed by the certainty that he had contracted rabies which would surface in time to kill him at sixteen. Like most serious hypochondriacs, he enjoyed full rude health until he was eighty.”
Read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-last-republican/
The Selected Essays were written over the course of a half-century (1953-2004), or almost one-quarter of the lifespan of the Republic that is Vidal’s primary subject—though it might more accurately be said that Vidal has been a contumacious patriot of the Old Republic for nigh the entirety of the post-Republic era. As such, he is a man out of time in the United States of Amnesia, as he calls his native and beloved land.
What a pleasure these essays are. One imagines Gore Vidal at his writing desk, hint of a smile creasing his mouth as he mints Saint-Gaudens gold-piece witticisms with Lincoln-penny frequency. Here he is on Ohio’s greatest novelist: “For a writer, Howells himself was more than usually a dedicated hypochondriac whose adolescence was shadowed by the certainty that he had contracted rabies which would surface in time to kill him at sixteen. Like most serious hypochondriacs, he enjoyed full rude health until he was eighty.”
Read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-last-republican/
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