Word: burr
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...young Vidal's firsthand glimpses of power as he accompanied his grandfather around Washington were eventually succeeded by the realization that he lacked the temperament to achieve such power himself. That is why his sympathy in his political novels goes out to history's losers, starting with Burr--betrayed, in Vidal's retelling, by the coldly ambitious Thomas Jefferson--all the way up to Adlai Stevenson, who twice played Hamlet to Dwight D. Eisenhower's Henry V. "Yes," Sanford notes in The Golden Age, "he couldn't make up his mind but at least he had one to make...
...well. But the novel completes a very American literary project that, for all its various humors, Vidal takes seriously indeed: a fictional history of the U.S. as portrayed through the conduct, mostly bad, of its elected leaders. This best-selling saga started with Washington, D.C. and continued with Burr (1973), 1876 (1976), Lincoln (1984), Empire (1987) and Hollywood (1990). The Golden Age wraps up the long story and includes a flash-forward to earlier this year, when Peter Sanford, overweight and 77, visits the Italian villa of his old friend Gore Vidal to tape a television program of shared musings...
...touch with the [Allston Burr] senior tutors and the Freshman Dean's Office as soon as I had information about it," she said. "I wish I'd known earlier so I could have gotten something in the registration envelopes...
...young Vidal's firsthand glimpses of power as he accompanied his grandfather around Washington were eventually succeeded by the realization that he lacked the temperament to achieve such power himself. That is why his sympathy in his political novels goes out to history's losers, starting with Burr - betrayed, in Vidal's retelling, by the coldly ambitious Thomas Jefferson - all the way up to Adlai Stevenson, who twice played Hamlet to Dwight D. Eisenhower's Henry V. "Yes," Sanford notes in "The Golden Age," "he couldn't make up his mind but at least he had one to make...
...worthy people are destined for defeat, what does that make of the winners? This question hums throughout Vidal's historical series, particularly as it applies to the biggest winners, U.S. presidents. Burr casts both Jefferson and George Washington in a harsh light. "Lincoln" portrays its protagonist as almost diabolically unknowable in his use of power; "Empire" makes merry with the boisterously ambitious Theodore Roosevelt. Vidal's fiction strives mightily to transform the faces on the Mount Rushmore monument into rubble and scree...