United States: Essays 1952-1992
by Gore Vidal
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"Gore Vidal's reputation as "America's finest essayist" is an enduring one. Vidal has a gift for writing about the events of the moment with an astuteness usually reserved for the beneficiaries of hindsight, and about events of the past with the familiarity of someone who has just come out of the room where they were happening. This collection, chosen by the author from forty years of work, contains about two thirds of what he has published in various magazines and journals. He has divided show more the essays into three categories, or states. State of the Art covers literature, including novelists and critics, bestsellers, pieces on the French New Novel, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Suetonius, Edmund Wilson, Nabokov, Herman Wouk, Italo Calvino, and Montaigne (a previously uncollected essay from 1992). State of the Union deals with politics and public life: sex, drugs, pornography, money, Abraham Lincoln, Eleanor Roosevelt, H.L. Mencken, "The Holy Family" (his famous essay on the Kennedys), Nixon, Reagan, 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, as well as Tennessee Williams, Anais Nin, making movies, travel, home. A lifetime of work from a writer of enormous intelligence, wit, and style."--Jacket. show lessTags
Recommendations
Member Reviews
I skimmed through a number of essays on H.L Mencken, President Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Orson Welles, Montaigne etc. Excellent writing. Vidal increases my vocabulary as I have to look up an unfamiliar word in just about every paragraph. Vidal’s writing is meant to be read slowly as he is an excellent wordsmith. Provactive writing from a very provactive mind.
Thankfully this collection stops just as Vidal's politics are becoming annoyingly cranky. Vidal in the twenty-first century has unfortunately taken some of the joy and some of the credit out of his sometimes daring, sometimes bitchy, but always entertaining essays from the late twentieth century. Which is a shame. They can still be a guilty pleasure though ;-)
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 show more state of being, we are given personal responses to people and events: recollections of his childhood, E. Nesbit, Tarzan, Tennessee Williams and Anais Nin. show less
Vidal write clearly and presents a very lucid point of view, which he marshals from a vast corpus of his reading, listening, watching, and thinking.
Many will disagree with his conclusions, or even with his presuppositions. The clarity of his arguments, however, gives the reader the opportunity to absorb his wisdom and experience without risk to his own.
It is hard to fault anything in this volume except for its length. The three main sections; on literature and the arts, on American politics, and on his own experience, could be as easily divided into separate volumes.
Many will disagree with his conclusions, or even with his presuppositions. The clarity of his arguments, however, gives the reader the opportunity to absorb his wisdom and experience without risk to his own.
It is hard to fault anything in this volume except for its length. The three main sections; on literature and the arts, on American politics, and on his own experience, could be as easily divided into separate volumes.
State of the Art -- State of the Union -- State of Being
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Vidal is much more than a novelist and critic of literature. He is also a commentator on politics, a gadfly who imagines himself a hornet. It took courage, or impregnable self-esteem, to reprint some of the pieces in State Of The Union, this book's second section. Vidal makes it clear that he knew most of the top people and was related to some of them. His pen is dipped in honey for an article show more on President Kennedy written in 1961, which calls im "withdrawn, observant, icily objective in crisis" (Cuba lay ahead). "Over the years I've occasionally passed books on to him", and not only books but the manuscript of a Vidal play about politics ("his comments were shrewd"). Some later back-tracking doesn't much change this idealised picture...
Some essays here offer the best available antidotes to past and current foolishness about deconstruction, academic pomposity, modernism in the novel, pretentiousness in the cinema. It is a pity that so much of what he writes should be marked and marred by a psychological need for self-advertisement. If Vidal loved himself a little less, we should like him a lot better and admire him more. show less
Some essays here offer the best available antidotes to past and current foolishness about deconstruction, academic pomposity, modernism in the novel, pretentiousness in the cinema. It is a pity that so much of what he writes should be marked and marred by a psychological need for self-advertisement. If Vidal loved himself a little less, we should like him a lot better and admire him more. show less
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Author Information
168+ Works 31,164 Members
Gore Vidal was born Eugene Luther Gore Vidal Jr. on October 3, 1925 at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York. He did not go to college but attended St. Albans School in Washington and graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire in 1943. He enlisted in the Army, where he became first mate on a freight supply ship in the show more Aleutian Islands. His first novel, Williwaw, was published in 1946 when he was twenty-one years old and working as an associate editor at the publishing company E. P. Dutton. The City and the Pillar was about a handsome, athletic young Virginia man who gradually discovers that he is homosexual, which caused controversy in the publishing world. The New York Times refused to advertise the novel and gave a negative review of it and future novels. He had such trouble getting subsequent novels reviewed that he turned to writing mysteries under the pseudonym Edgar Box and then gave up novel-writing altogether for a time. Once he moved to Hollywood, he wrote television dramas, screenplays, and plays. His films included I Accuse, Suddenly Last Summer with Tennessee Williams, Is Paris Burning? with Francis Ford Coppola, and Ben-Hur. His most successful play was The Best Man, which he also adapted into a film. He started writing novels again in the 1960's including Julian, Washington, D.C., Myra Breckenridge, Burr, Myron, 1876, Lincoln, Hollywood, Live From Golgotha: The Gospel According to Gore Vidal, and The Golden Age. He also published two collections of essays entitled The Second American Revolution, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism in 1982 and United States: Essays 1952-1992. In 2009, he received the National Book Awards lifetime achievement award. He died from complications of pneumonia on July 31, 2012 at the age of 86. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Awards and Honors
Awards
Distinctions
Common Knowledge
- Original publication date
- 1993
- People/Characters
- John F. Kennedy; Norman Mailer; Dawn Powell; Tennessee Williams; Richard M. Nixon; Orson Welles (show all 12); Italo Calvino; Leonardo Sciascia; Edmund Wilson; Thomas Love Peacock; Henry James; Abraham Lincoln
- Important places
- Washington, D.C., USA
- First words
- AUTHOR’S NOTE
I wrote the first of these pieces in 1952, the year that Eisenhower was elected president, and the last in 1992, the year of Clinton’s election.
ECKERMANN: I’m delighted that The New York Review of Books is still going strong after—what is it now? Fifty years? - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Thus, Glory and its Reflection had at last combined—not so much in death, where all things must, but in the precedent art and its true sanity.
- Canonical DDC/MDS
- 814.54
- Canonical LCC
- PS3543.I26
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 767
- Popularity
- 36,321
- Reviews
- 8
- Rating
- (4.29)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 7
- ASINs
- 5
