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Zusatztext “Gore Vidal is the master essayist of our age.” — The Washington Post Book World “Vidal is the best all-around American man of letters since Edmund Wilson.” — Newsweek “Wonderfully selected. . . . All classic Vidal essays are here. . . . [They] confirm Vidal's stature.” — The Buffalo News “Gore Vidal! essayist; so good that we cannot do without him. He is a treasure of the state.” —R.W.B. Lewis! The New York Times Book Review “Fearlessness and independence of mind are the strengths in this author’s arms! but his heart’s love is language and the richness of language.”— Los Angeles Times Book Review Informationen zum Autor Gore Vidal was born in 1925 at the United States Military Academy at West Point. His first novel, Williwaw , written when he was nineteen years old and serving in the Army, appeared in the spring of 1946. Since then he has written twenty-three novels, five plays, many screenplays, short stories, well over two hundred essays, and a memoir. Jay Parini (born 1948) is an American writer and academic. Among his works of fiction and criticism are The Last Station , John Steinbeck , and Benjamin's Crossing . Parini is Gore Vidal's literary executor and a regular contributor to various journals and newspapers, including The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Guardian (U.K.). In 1976, he cofounded New England Review , and he has taught at Middlebury College since 1982. He lives in Vermont. Klappentext Gore Vidal—novelist, playwright, critic, screenwriter, memoirist, indefatigable political commentator, and controversialist—is America's premier man of letters. No other living writer brings more sparkling wit, vast learning, indelible personality, and provocative mirth to the job of writing an essay.This long-needed volume comprises some twenty-four of his best-loved pieces of criticism, political commentary, memoir, portraiture, and, occasionally, unfettered score settling. It will stand as one of the most enjoyable and durable works from the hand and mind of this vastly accomplished and entertaining immortal of American literature.NOVELISTS AND CRITICS OF THE 1940s It is a rare and lucky physician who can predict accurately at birth whether a child is to become a dwarf or a giant or an ordinary adult, since most babies look alike and the curious arrangements of chromosomes which govern stature are inscrutable and do not yield their secret order even to the shrewdest eye. Time alone gives definition. Nevertheless, interested readers and writers, like anxious parents and midwives, forever speculate upon the direction and meaning of current literary trends, and professional commentators with grave authority make analyses which the briefest interval often declares invalid. But despite their long historic record of bad guesses, bookish men continue to make judgments, and the recorded derelictions of taste and the erratic judgments of earlier times tend only to confirm in them a sense of complacency: they are not we, and did not know; we know. To disturb this complacency is occasionally worthwhile, and one way of doing it is to exhume significant critical texts from the recent past. Those of the last century, in particular, provide us with fine warnings. For instance: “We do not believe any good end is to be effected by fictions which fill the mind with details of imaginary vice and distress and crime, or which teach it instead of endeavoring after the fulfillment of simple and ordinary duty to aim at the assurance of superiority by creating for itself fanciful and incomprehensible perplexities. Rather we believe that the effect of such fictions tends to render those who fall under their influence unfit for practical exertion by intruding on minds which ought to be guarded from impurity the unnecessary knowledge of evil.” This was the Quarterly Review on George Eliot’s...
