Description
Book SynopsisThis collection of critical essays attempts to construct a comprehensive portrait of Vidal's writings and to determine why his work has been underestimated. It includes an interview with Vidal in which he discusses his career and his troubled relationship with literary reviewers.
Table of ContentsGore Vidal: A Chronology of His Works1. Jay Parini--Gore Vidal: The Writer and His Critics 2. Italo Calvino--Imagining Vidal 3. David Price--Williwaw: Gore Vidal's First Novel 4. Claude J. Summers--The City and the Pillar as Gay Fiction 5. Bernard F. Dick--Gore Vidal: The Entertainer 6. Robert F. Kiernan--The Vidalian Manner: The Judgement of Paris, Two Sisters, Kalki 7. Alan Cheuse--A Note on Vidal's Messiah 8. Heather Neilson--The Fiction of History in Gore Vidal's Messiah 9. Ray Lewis White--Vidal as Playwright: In Gentlest Heresy 10. William H. Pritchard--Vidal's Satiric Voices 11. Samuel F. Pickering--Living Appropriately: Vidal and the Essay 12. Robert Boyers--On Gore Vidal: Wit and the Work of Criticism 13. Thomas M. Disch--Vidal as Essayist: The Man Who Has Everything 14. Stephen Spender--Gore Vidal: Private Eye 15. Catharine R. Stimpson--My O My O Myra 16. James Tatum--The Romanitas of Gore Vidal 17. Harold Bloom--The Central Man: On Gore Vidal's Lincoln 18. Richard Poirier--Vidal's Empire 19. Louis Auchincloss--Babylon Revisited 20. Donald E. Pease--America and the Vidal Chronicles 21. Jay Parini--An Interview with Gore VidalNotes Selected Bibliography Contributors Index
