United States: Essays 1952-1992 by Gore Vidal

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is the first of Gore Vidal's works I've ever read, which is odd, considering that his career more or less spanned my life. Vidal's writings don't fit into any easy categories, and perhaps that's why he is generally ignored by English departments. And the fact that he was always highly disparaging of the criticism that came out of such places and the writers who inhabited them.

I first became aware of Vidal in 1968, when the TV network, ABC, which had poor ratings, hired him and William F. Buckley, Jr. to serve as high level talking head commentators on the Democratic and Republican conventions. I was familiar with Buckley from his PBS TV show, "Firing Line." I admired Buckley's linguistic gifts even when a rarely agreed with his perspective, but I never expected that I would feel sorry form. Gore Vidal did that. The Buckley v. Vidal events became must see TV, just as the police riots in the streets of Chicago were.

This collection of essays covers the years listed in the title. It was highly acclaimed after it came out, and now that I've made my way through it, I see why. Vidal's writing style is immensely entertaining in a way that I never found his conversational style in all the TV appearances he made over the years, during which his patrician/condescending mannerism were often off putting. On the page, he seems incredibly prescient. His criticism of academia and the lack of American literacy is as spot on today as it was at any time in the 40 years that the essays cover. I found his essay on Egypt, for instance, published in 1963, as current today as it must have been then. In fact all of the essays, and there are many of them within this 1273 page tome, all seem as though they could have been written today.

For those who are not familiar with Vidal, he not only wrote essays, but also short stories, novels, TV shows during its so called golden age, and film, including having worked on the continuously popular "Ben Her" with its hidden homosexual story line.



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