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Download high-resolution image Look inside

The Last Empire

Essays 1992-2000

Part of Vintage International

Author Gore Vidal
Look inside
Paperback
$17.95 US
Knopf | Vintage
On sale Jun 11, 2002 | 480 Pages | 978-0-375-72639-2
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  • English > Comparative Literature > Literary Criticism
  • English > Comparative Literature > Politics and Literature
  • About
  • Excerpt
  • Author
Like his National Book Award—winning United States, Gore Vidal’s scintillating ninth collection, The Last Empire, affirms his reputation as our most provocative critic and observer of the modern American scene. In the essays collected here, Vidal brings his keen intellect, experience, and razor-edged wit to bear on an astonishing range of subjects. From his celebrated profiles of Clare Boothe Luce and Charles Lindbergh and his controversial essay about the Bill of Rights–which sparked an extended correspondence with convicted Oklahoma City Bomber Timothy McVeigh–to his provocative analyses of literary icons such as John Updike and Mark Twain and his trenchant observations about terrorism, civil liberties, the CIA, Al Gore, Tony Blair, and the Clintons, Vidal weaves a rich tapestry of personal anecdote, critical insight, and historical detail. Written between the first presidential campaign of Bill Clinton and the electoral crisis of 2000, The Last Empire is a sweeping coda to the last century’s conflicted vision of the American dream.

“Gore Vidal is the master essayist of our age.” –The Washington Post Book World

“Lively, instructive, lucid and amusing. Vidal has a carefree touch and a humorous air. . . . [He] can be a marvelous wit.” –Paul Berman, The New York Times Book Review

“Indispensable. . . . An excellent read. . . . Provocateur, scholar, historian, novelist, scoundrel, whatever you want to call Gore Vidal–make sure you include ‘national treasure.’ . . . [He] is an original mind, who thinks and sees without regard to convention. That alone makes him required reading.” –The Sunday Oregonian

Contents

Part I
Edmund Wilson: Nineteenth-Century Man
Dawn Powell: Queen of the Golden Age
Lost New York
The Romance of Sinclair Lewis
Twain on the Grand Tour
Reply to a Critic
Twain's Letters
Rabbit's Own Burrow
A Note on The City and the Pillar and Thomas Mann
Anthony Burgess
Pride
Lindbergh: The Eagle Is Grounded
Sinatra
C. P. Cavafy

Part II
George
Amistad
FDR: Love on the Hudson
Wiretapping the Oval Office
Clare Booth Luce
Truman
Hersh's JFK
Nixon R.I.P.
Clinton-Gore I
Bedfellows Make Strange Politics
Clinton-Gore II
Honorable Albert J. Gore, Junior
Kopkind
Bad History
Blair

Part III
How We Missed the Saturday Dance
The Last Empire
In the Lair of the Octopus
With Extreme Prejudice
Time for a People's Convention
The Union of the State
Mickey Mouse, Historian
U.S. Out of UN—UN Out of U.S.
Race Against Time
Chaos

Part IV
Shredding the Bill of Rights
The New Theocrats
Coup de Starr
Starr Conspiracy
Birds and Bees and Clinton
A Letter To Be Delivered
Democratic Vistas
Three Lies to Rule By
Japanese Intentions in the Second World War
Edmund Wilson: Nineteenth-Century Man

"Old age is a shipwreck." Like many a ground soldier, General de Gaulle was drawn to maritime metaphors. Of course shipwrecks are not like happy families. There is the Titanic-swift departure in the presence of a floating mountain of ice, as the orchestra plays the overture from Tales of Hoffmann. There is the slow settling to full fathom five as holds fill up with water, giving the soon-to-be-drowned sufficient time to collect his thoughts about eternity and wetness. It was Edmund Wilson's fate to sink slowly from 1960 to June 12, 1972, when he went full fathom five. The last entry in his journal is a bit of doggerel for his wife Elena: "Is that a bird or a leaf? / Good grief! / My eyes are old and dim, / And I am getting deaf, my dear, / Your words are no more clear / And I can hardly swim. / I find this rather grim."

"Rather grim" describes The Sixties, Wilson's journals covering his last decade. This volume's editor, Lewis M. Dabney, starts with an epigraph from Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium," thus striking the valetudinarian note. New Year 1960 finds Wilson at Harvard as Lowell Professor of English. He suffers from angina, arthritis, gout, and hangovers. "At my age, I find that I alternate between spells of fatigue and indifference when I am almost ready to give up the struggle, and spells of expanding ambition, when I feel that I can do more than ever before." He is in his sixty-fifth year, a time more usually deciduous than mellowly fruitful. But then he is distracted by the people that he meets and the conversations that he holds, all the while drinking until the words start to come in sharp not always coherent barks; yet the mind is functioning with all its old energy. He is learning Hungarian, as he earlier learned Hebrew and before that Russian, a language whose finer points and arcane nuances he so generously and memorably shared with Vladimir Nabokov, unhinging their friendship in the process.

During his last decade, Wilson published Apologies to the Iroquois, a project that he had set himself as, more and more, he came to live in the stone house of his mother's York combination of Ulster and Dutch; and so, in a sense, he had come home to die. Also, to work prodigiously. He made his apologies to the Indian tribes that his family, among others, had displaced. In O, Canada, he paid belated attention to the large familiar remoteness to the north which he had visited in youth with his father. He wrote book reviews; spent time at Wellfleet where he had a house; visited New York; went abroad to Israel, Hungary.

The decade was made unpleasant by the fact that he had neglected to file an income tax return between the years 1946 and 1955. The Internal Revenue Service moved in. He was allowed a certain amount to live on. The rest went to the Treasury. He was also under a grotesque sort of surveillance. Agents would ask him why he had spent so much money for a dog's cushion. Wilson's response to this mess was a splendid, much ignored polemical book called The Cold War and the Income Tax, which he saw as the two sides to the same imperial coin. The American people were kept frightened and obedient by a fear of the Soviet Union, which their government told them was on the march everywhere, as well as by the punitive income tax, which was needed in order to pay for a military machine that alone stood between the cowed people and slavery. It was better, we were warned, to be dead than red--as opposed to just plain in the red.

Maximum income tax in those days was 90 percent. Wilson's anarchic response was later, more slyly, matched by the Reagan backlash; instead of raising money to fight the enemy through taxes, the money was raised through borrowing. The result is that, today, even though we have not only sailed to but made landfall in Byzantium, the economy remains militarized, as Wilson had so untactfully noted. At sixty-eight, his present reviewer's green age, he writes, "I have finally come to feel that this country, whether or not I live in it, is no longer any place for me." Not that he has any other country in view: "I find that I more and more feel a boredom with and scorn for the human race. We have such a long way to go. . . ." He, of course, was a professional signpost, a warning light.

Despite boredom and scorn Wilson soldiered on, reading and writing and thinking. He published his most original book, Patriotic Gore. He acknowledges a critical biography of him. The book has a preface by a hack of academe who refers to Patriotic Gore as a "shapeless hodgepodge." Since remedial reading courses do not exist for the tenured, Wilson can only note that his survey of why North and South fought in the Civil War

is actually very much organized. . . . I don't think that Moore understands that with such books I am always working with a plan and structure in mind. As a journalist, I sell the various sections to magazines as I can. . . . He is also incorrect in implying, as several other people have, that I studied Hebrew for the purpose of writing on the Dead Sea scrolls. It was the other way around: it was from studying Hebrew that I become curious to find out what was going on in connection with the scrolls.

He ends, nicely, with a list of errata, even "though I doubt whether your book will ever get into a second printing."

In the introduction to Patriotic Gore, Wilson broods on the self-aggrandizing nature of nation-states, one of which, he is sad to note, is the United States, in all its unexceptionalism. Apropos the wars,

Having myself lived through a couple of world wars, and having read a certain amount of history, I am no longer disposed to take very seriously the professions of "war aims" that nations make. . . .

We Americans have not yet had to suffer from the worst of the calamities that have followed on the dictatorships in Germany and Russia, but we have been going for a long time now quite steadily in the same direction.

Why did North want to fight South? And why was South willing, so extravagantly, to die for what Seward had scornfully called their "mosquito republics"? Through an analysis of the fiction and rhetoric of the conflict, Wilson presents us with a new view of the matter while dispensing with received opinion. He also places his analysis in the full context of the cold war just as it was about to turn hot in Vietnam. Before anyone knew precisely what our national security state really was, Wilson, thirty years ago, got it right:

The Russians and we produced nuclear weapons to flourish at one another and played the game of calling bad names when there had been nothing at issue between us that need have prevented our living in the same world and when we were actually, for better or worse, becoming more and more alike--the Russians emulating America in their frantic industrialization and we imitating them in our persecution of non-conformist political opinion, while both, to achieve their ends, were building up huge governmental bureaucracies in the hands of which the people have seemed helpless.

Predictably, this set off alarm bells. At the Algonquin, May 15, 1962, Wilson meets Alfred Kazin. "I took Alfred back to a couch and talked to him about his review of Patriotic Gore. He showed a certain indignation over my Introduction: I and my people "had it made" and didn't sympathize with the Negroes and people like him, the son of immigrants, who had found in the United States freedom and opportunity. He is still full of romantic faith in American ideals and promises, and it is hard for him to see what we are really doing."

In Patriotic Gore, Wilson questioned the central myth of the American republic, which is also, paradoxically, the cornerstone of our subsequent empire--e pluribus unum--the ever tightening control from the center to the periphery. Wilson is pre-Lincolnian (or a Lincolnian of 1846). He sees virtue, freedom in a less perfect union. Today's centrifugal forces in the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia he anticipated in Patriotic Gore where, through his portraits of various leaders in our Civil War, he shows how people, in order to free themselves of an overcentralized state, are more than willing, and most tragically, to shed patriotic gore.

To be fair, Wilson set off alarm bells in less naive quarters. As one reads reviews of the book by such honorable establishment figures as Henry Steele Commager and Robert Penn Warren one is struck by their defensive misunderstanding not only of his text but of our common state. At times, they sound like apologists for an empire that wants to present itself as not only flawless but uniquely Good. Commager zeroes in on the Darwinian introduction. He notes, as other reviewers do, Justice Holmes's Realpolitik: "that it seems to me that every society rests on the death of men." But Commager is troubled that Wilson "does not see fit to quote" the peroration of "The Soldier's Faith," Holmes's memorial address, with its purple "snowy heights of honor" for the Civil War dead. Yet Wilson quotes the crux of Holmes's speech,

There is one thing that I do not doubt, no man who lives in the world with most of us can doubt, and that is that the faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he has no notion, under tactics of which he little understands.

Surely, that is quite enough patriotic tears for spilled gore.

In 1963, as pontifex maximus of the old American republic, Wilson is speaking out with a Roman hardness and clarity, and sadness at what has been lost since the Union's victory at Appomattox. Our eighteenth-century res publicus had been replaced by a hard-boiled soft-minded imperium, ever eager to use that terrible swift sword, presumably for ever, unless, of course, we are struck down by the current great Satan who threatens our lives and sacred honor in the high lands of Somalia. Wilson has no great sentimentality about the Indian-killing, slave-holding founders but he is concerned by the absolute loss of any moral idea other than Holmes's bleakly reductive "every society rests on the death of men." It is not this sad truth that Wilson is challenging, thus causing distress to the apologists of empire; rather it is their clumsy ongoing falsifications of motives, their misleading rhetoric all "snowy heights of honor" (try that one on a Vietnam veteran), their deep complicity in an empire that is now based not only on understandable greed but far worse on a mindless vanity to seem invincible abroad and in full control of all the folks at home. Just as the empire was about to play out its last act in Southeast Asia, Wilson's meditation on the Civil War and war and the nature of our state was published and: "There is shock after shock," as Penn Warren put it, "to our official versions and received opinions." But, surely, shock is what writers are meant to apply when the patient has lost touch with reality. Unhappily, many others are in place to act as shock-absorbers. They also shroud the martyred Lincoln with his disingenuous funeral address at Gettysburg in order to distract attention from the uncomfortable paradox that his dictatorship--forbidden word in a free country--preserved the Union by destroying its soul.
Copyright © 2001 by Gore Vidal. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) was born at the United States Military Academy at West Point. His first novel, Williwaw, written when he was 19 years old and serving in the army, appeared in the spring of 1946. He wrote 23 novels, five plays, many screenplays, short stories, well over 200 essays, and a memoir. View titles by Gore Vidal

About

Like his National Book Award—winning United States, Gore Vidal’s scintillating ninth collection, The Last Empire, affirms his reputation as our most provocative critic and observer of the modern American scene. In the essays collected here, Vidal brings his keen intellect, experience, and razor-edged wit to bear on an astonishing range of subjects. From his celebrated profiles of Clare Boothe Luce and Charles Lindbergh and his controversial essay about the Bill of Rights–which sparked an extended correspondence with convicted Oklahoma City Bomber Timothy McVeigh–to his provocative analyses of literary icons such as John Updike and Mark Twain and his trenchant observations about terrorism, civil liberties, the CIA, Al Gore, Tony Blair, and the Clintons, Vidal weaves a rich tapestry of personal anecdote, critical insight, and historical detail. Written between the first presidential campaign of Bill Clinton and the electoral crisis of 2000, The Last Empire is a sweeping coda to the last century’s conflicted vision of the American dream.

“Gore Vidal is the master essayist of our age.” –The Washington Post Book World

“Lively, instructive, lucid and amusing. Vidal has a carefree touch and a humorous air. . . . [He] can be a marvelous wit.” –Paul Berman, The New York Times Book Review

“Indispensable. . . . An excellent read. . . . Provocateur, scholar, historian, novelist, scoundrel, whatever you want to call Gore Vidal–make sure you include ‘national treasure.’ . . . [He] is an original mind, who thinks and sees without regard to convention. That alone makes him required reading.” –The Sunday Oregonian

Contents

Part I
Edmund Wilson: Nineteenth-Century Man
Dawn Powell: Queen of the Golden Age
Lost New York
The Romance of Sinclair Lewis
Twain on the Grand Tour
Reply to a Critic
Twain's Letters
Rabbit's Own Burrow
A Note on The City and the Pillar and Thomas Mann
Anthony Burgess
Pride
Lindbergh: The Eagle Is Grounded
Sinatra
C. P. Cavafy

Part II
George
Amistad
FDR: Love on the Hudson
Wiretapping the Oval Office
Clare Booth Luce
Truman
Hersh's JFK
Nixon R.I.P.
Clinton-Gore I
Bedfellows Make Strange Politics
Clinton-Gore II
Honorable Albert J. Gore, Junior
Kopkind
Bad History
Blair

Part III
How We Missed the Saturday Dance
The Last Empire
In the Lair of the Octopus
With Extreme Prejudice
Time for a People's Convention
The Union of the State
Mickey Mouse, Historian
U.S. Out of UN—UN Out of U.S.
Race Against Time
Chaos

Part IV
Shredding the Bill of Rights
The New Theocrats
Coup de Starr
Starr Conspiracy
Birds and Bees and Clinton
A Letter To Be Delivered
Democratic Vistas
Three Lies to Rule By
Japanese Intentions in the Second World War

Excerpt

Edmund Wilson: Nineteenth-Century Man

"Old age is a shipwreck." Like many a ground soldier, General de Gaulle was drawn to maritime metaphors. Of course shipwrecks are not like happy families. There is the Titanic-swift departure in the presence of a floating mountain of ice, as the orchestra plays the overture from Tales of Hoffmann. There is the slow settling to full fathom five as holds fill up with water, giving the soon-to-be-drowned sufficient time to collect his thoughts about eternity and wetness. It was Edmund Wilson's fate to sink slowly from 1960 to June 12, 1972, when he went full fathom five. The last entry in his journal is a bit of doggerel for his wife Elena: "Is that a bird or a leaf? / Good grief! / My eyes are old and dim, / And I am getting deaf, my dear, / Your words are no more clear / And I can hardly swim. / I find this rather grim."

"Rather grim" describes The Sixties, Wilson's journals covering his last decade. This volume's editor, Lewis M. Dabney, starts with an epigraph from Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium," thus striking the valetudinarian note. New Year 1960 finds Wilson at Harvard as Lowell Professor of English. He suffers from angina, arthritis, gout, and hangovers. "At my age, I find that I alternate between spells of fatigue and indifference when I am almost ready to give up the struggle, and spells of expanding ambition, when I feel that I can do more than ever before." He is in his sixty-fifth year, a time more usually deciduous than mellowly fruitful. But then he is distracted by the people that he meets and the conversations that he holds, all the while drinking until the words start to come in sharp not always coherent barks; yet the mind is functioning with all its old energy. He is learning Hungarian, as he earlier learned Hebrew and before that Russian, a language whose finer points and arcane nuances he so generously and memorably shared with Vladimir Nabokov, unhinging their friendship in the process.

During his last decade, Wilson published Apologies to the Iroquois, a project that he had set himself as, more and more, he came to live in the stone house of his mother's York combination of Ulster and Dutch; and so, in a sense, he had come home to die. Also, to work prodigiously. He made his apologies to the Indian tribes that his family, among others, had displaced. In O, Canada, he paid belated attention to the large familiar remoteness to the north which he had visited in youth with his father. He wrote book reviews; spent time at Wellfleet where he had a house; visited New York; went abroad to Israel, Hungary.

The decade was made unpleasant by the fact that he had neglected to file an income tax return between the years 1946 and 1955. The Internal Revenue Service moved in. He was allowed a certain amount to live on. The rest went to the Treasury. He was also under a grotesque sort of surveillance. Agents would ask him why he had spent so much money for a dog's cushion. Wilson's response to this mess was a splendid, much ignored polemical book called The Cold War and the Income Tax, which he saw as the two sides to the same imperial coin. The American people were kept frightened and obedient by a fear of the Soviet Union, which their government told them was on the march everywhere, as well as by the punitive income tax, which was needed in order to pay for a military machine that alone stood between the cowed people and slavery. It was better, we were warned, to be dead than red--as opposed to just plain in the red.

Maximum income tax in those days was 90 percent. Wilson's anarchic response was later, more slyly, matched by the Reagan backlash; instead of raising money to fight the enemy through taxes, the money was raised through borrowing. The result is that, today, even though we have not only sailed to but made landfall in Byzantium, the economy remains militarized, as Wilson had so untactfully noted. At sixty-eight, his present reviewer's green age, he writes, "I have finally come to feel that this country, whether or not I live in it, is no longer any place for me." Not that he has any other country in view: "I find that I more and more feel a boredom with and scorn for the human race. We have such a long way to go. . . ." He, of course, was a professional signpost, a warning light.

Despite boredom and scorn Wilson soldiered on, reading and writing and thinking. He published his most original book, Patriotic Gore. He acknowledges a critical biography of him. The book has a preface by a hack of academe who refers to Patriotic Gore as a "shapeless hodgepodge." Since remedial reading courses do not exist for the tenured, Wilson can only note that his survey of why North and South fought in the Civil War

is actually very much organized. . . . I don't think that Moore understands that with such books I am always working with a plan and structure in mind. As a journalist, I sell the various sections to magazines as I can. . . . He is also incorrect in implying, as several other people have, that I studied Hebrew for the purpose of writing on the Dead Sea scrolls. It was the other way around: it was from studying Hebrew that I become curious to find out what was going on in connection with the scrolls.

He ends, nicely, with a list of errata, even "though I doubt whether your book will ever get into a second printing."

In the introduction to Patriotic Gore, Wilson broods on the self-aggrandizing nature of nation-states, one of which, he is sad to note, is the United States, in all its unexceptionalism. Apropos the wars,

Having myself lived through a couple of world wars, and having read a certain amount of history, I am no longer disposed to take very seriously the professions of "war aims" that nations make. . . .

We Americans have not yet had to suffer from the worst of the calamities that have followed on the dictatorships in Germany and Russia, but we have been going for a long time now quite steadily in the same direction.

Why did North want to fight South? And why was South willing, so extravagantly, to die for what Seward had scornfully called their "mosquito republics"? Through an analysis of the fiction and rhetoric of the conflict, Wilson presents us with a new view of the matter while dispensing with received opinion. He also places his analysis in the full context of the cold war just as it was about to turn hot in Vietnam. Before anyone knew precisely what our national security state really was, Wilson, thirty years ago, got it right:

The Russians and we produced nuclear weapons to flourish at one another and played the game of calling bad names when there had been nothing at issue between us that need have prevented our living in the same world and when we were actually, for better or worse, becoming more and more alike--the Russians emulating America in their frantic industrialization and we imitating them in our persecution of non-conformist political opinion, while both, to achieve their ends, were building up huge governmental bureaucracies in the hands of which the people have seemed helpless.

Predictably, this set off alarm bells. At the Algonquin, May 15, 1962, Wilson meets Alfred Kazin. "I took Alfred back to a couch and talked to him about his review of Patriotic Gore. He showed a certain indignation over my Introduction: I and my people "had it made" and didn't sympathize with the Negroes and people like him, the son of immigrants, who had found in the United States freedom and opportunity. He is still full of romantic faith in American ideals and promises, and it is hard for him to see what we are really doing."

In Patriotic Gore, Wilson questioned the central myth of the American republic, which is also, paradoxically, the cornerstone of our subsequent empire--e pluribus unum--the ever tightening control from the center to the periphery. Wilson is pre-Lincolnian (or a Lincolnian of 1846). He sees virtue, freedom in a less perfect union. Today's centrifugal forces in the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia he anticipated in Patriotic Gore where, through his portraits of various leaders in our Civil War, he shows how people, in order to free themselves of an overcentralized state, are more than willing, and most tragically, to shed patriotic gore.

To be fair, Wilson set off alarm bells in less naive quarters. As one reads reviews of the book by such honorable establishment figures as Henry Steele Commager and Robert Penn Warren one is struck by their defensive misunderstanding not only of his text but of our common state. At times, they sound like apologists for an empire that wants to present itself as not only flawless but uniquely Good. Commager zeroes in on the Darwinian introduction. He notes, as other reviewers do, Justice Holmes's Realpolitik: "that it seems to me that every society rests on the death of men." But Commager is troubled that Wilson "does not see fit to quote" the peroration of "The Soldier's Faith," Holmes's memorial address, with its purple "snowy heights of honor" for the Civil War dead. Yet Wilson quotes the crux of Holmes's speech,

There is one thing that I do not doubt, no man who lives in the world with most of us can doubt, and that is that the faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he has no notion, under tactics of which he little understands.

Surely, that is quite enough patriotic tears for spilled gore.

In 1963, as pontifex maximus of the old American republic, Wilson is speaking out with a Roman hardness and clarity, and sadness at what has been lost since the Union's victory at Appomattox. Our eighteenth-century res publicus had been replaced by a hard-boiled soft-minded imperium, ever eager to use that terrible swift sword, presumably for ever, unless, of course, we are struck down by the current great Satan who threatens our lives and sacred honor in the high lands of Somalia. Wilson has no great sentimentality about the Indian-killing, slave-holding founders but he is concerned by the absolute loss of any moral idea other than Holmes's bleakly reductive "every society rests on the death of men." It is not this sad truth that Wilson is challenging, thus causing distress to the apologists of empire; rather it is their clumsy ongoing falsifications of motives, their misleading rhetoric all "snowy heights of honor" (try that one on a Vietnam veteran), their deep complicity in an empire that is now based not only on understandable greed but far worse on a mindless vanity to seem invincible abroad and in full control of all the folks at home. Just as the empire was about to play out its last act in Southeast Asia, Wilson's meditation on the Civil War and war and the nature of our state was published and: "There is shock after shock," as Penn Warren put it, "to our official versions and received opinions." But, surely, shock is what writers are meant to apply when the patient has lost touch with reality. Unhappily, many others are in place to act as shock-absorbers. They also shroud the martyred Lincoln with his disingenuous funeral address at Gettysburg in order to distract attention from the uncomfortable paradox that his dictatorship--forbidden word in a free country--preserved the Union by destroying its soul.
Copyright © 2001 by Gore Vidal. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Author

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) was born at the United States Military Academy at West Point. His first novel, Williwaw, written when he was 19 years old and serving in the army, appeared in the spring of 1946. He wrote 23 novels, five plays, many screenplays, short stories, well over 200 essays, and a memoir. View titles by Gore Vidal

Additional formats

  • The Last Empire
    The Last Empire
    Essays 1992-2000
    Gore Vidal
    978-1-4000-3299-0
    $12.99 US
    Ebook
    Vintage
    Aug 13, 2002
  • The Last Empire
    The Last Empire
    Essays 1992-2000
    Gore Vidal
    978-1-4000-3299-0
    $12.99 US
    Ebook
    Vintage
    Aug 13, 2002

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  • Palimpsest
    Palimpsest
    A Memoir
    Gore Vidal
    978-0-593-31439-5
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Nov 16, 2021
  • Season of Anomy
    Season of Anomy
    Wole Soyinka
    978-0-593-46719-0
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 14, 2021
  • The Interpreters
    The Interpreters
    Wole Soyinka
    978-0-593-46721-3
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 14, 2021
  • Here We Are
    Here We Are
    A novel
    Graham Swift
    978-1-9848-9952-1
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Aug 10, 2021
  • Juneteenth (Revised)
    Juneteenth (Revised)
    Ralph Ellison
    978-0-593-31461-6
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 18, 2021
  • Think, Write, Speak
    Think, Write, Speak
    Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor
    Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov Literary Trust
    978-1-101-87370-0
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 09, 2021
  • The Wapshot Chronicle
    The Wapshot Chronicle
    John Cheever
    978-0-593-08177-8
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 02, 2021
  • The Wapshot Scandal
    The Wapshot Scandal
    John Cheever
    978-0-593-31289-6
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 02, 2021
  • Love in the Time of Cholera (Illustrated Edition)
    Love in the Time of Cholera (Illustrated Edition)
    Gabriel García Márquez
    978-0-593-31085-4
    $25.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 27, 2020
  • The Scandal of the Century
    The Scandal of the Century
    And Other Writings
    Gabriel García Márquez
    978-0-525-56680-9
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 15, 2020
  • Personal Writings
    Personal Writings
    Albert Camus
    978-0-525-56721-9
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Aug 04, 2020
  • Berta Isla
    Berta Isla
    A novel
    Javier Marías
    978-0-525-56312-9
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 07, 2020
  • Life for Sale
    Life for Sale
    Yukio Mishima
    978-0-525-56514-7
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 07, 2020
  • The Source of Self-Regard
    The Source of Self-Regard
    Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations
    Toni Morrison
    978-0-525-56279-5
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 14, 2020
  • Love Is Blind
    Love Is Blind
    A novel
    William Boyd
    978-0-525-56444-7
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 24, 2019
  • So Much Life Left Over
    So Much Life Left Over
    A Novel
    Louis de Bernieres
    978-0-525-56441-6
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 09, 2019
  • Myra Breckinridge
    Myra Breckinridge
    Gore Vidal
    978-0-525-56650-2
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 21, 2019
  • Warlight
    Warlight
    Michael Ondaatje
    978-0-525-56296-2
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 02, 2019
  • First Person
    First Person
    Richard Flanagan
    978-0-525-43577-8
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 05, 2019
  • The Only Story
    The Only Story
    A novel
    Julian Barnes
    978-0-525-56306-8
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 05, 2019
  • A Long Way from Home
    A Long Way from Home
    Peter Carey
    978-0-525-43599-0
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 05, 2019
  • The Rub of Time
    The Rub of Time
    Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage, 1994-2017
    Martin Amis
    978-1-4000-9599-5
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 22, 2019
  • I'm Not Here to Give a Speech
    I'm Not Here to Give a Speech
    Gabriel García Márquez
    978-1-101-91118-1
    $14.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 08, 2019
  • The Frolic of the Beasts
    The Frolic of the Beasts
    Yukio Mishima
    978-0-525-43415-3
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Nov 27, 2018
  • The Myth of Sisyphus
    The Myth of Sisyphus
    Albert Camus
    978-0-525-56445-4
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Nov 06, 2018
  • Dinner at the Center of the Earth
    Dinner at the Center of the Earth
    Nathan Englander
    978-0-525-43404-7
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 04, 2018
  • Between Eternities
    Between Eternities
    And Other Writings
    Javier Marías
    978-1-101-97211-3
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Aug 28, 2018
  • A Boy in Winter
    A Boy in Winter
    A Novel
    Rachel Seiffert
    978-0-8041-6880-9
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 10, 2018
  • The Red-Haired Woman
    The Red-Haired Woman
    Orhan Pamuk
    978-1-101-97423-0
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 10, 2018
  • Men Without Women
    Men Without Women
    Stories
    Haruki Murakami
    978-1-101-97452-0
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 01, 2018
  • The Golden Legend
    The Golden Legend
    A novel
    Nadeem Aslam
    978-1-101-97338-7
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 24, 2018
  • The Woman on the Stairs
    The Woman on the Stairs
    A Novel
    Bernhard Schlink
    978-1-101-91234-8
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 20, 2018
  • A Horse Walks Into a Bar
    A Horse Walks Into a Bar
    A novel
    David Grossman
    978-1-101-97349-3
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 16, 2018
  • South and West
    South and West
    From a Notebook
    Joan Didion
    978-0-525-43419-1
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 02, 2018
  • Letters to Véra
    Letters to Véra
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-307-47658-6
    $22.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Dec 12, 2017
  • House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories
    House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories
    Yasunari Kawabata
    978-0-525-43414-6
    $9.99 US
    Ebook
    Vintage
    Dec 12, 2017
  • The Boat Rocker
    The Boat Rocker
    A Novel
    Ha Jin
    978-0-8041-7037-6
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 17, 2017
  • Absolutely on Music
    Absolutely on Music
    Conversations
    Haruki Murakami, Seiji Ozawa
    978-0-8041-7372-8
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 03, 2017
  • The Spy
    The Spy
    A Novel of Mata Hari
    Paulo Coelho
    978-0-525-43279-1
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 27, 2017
  • Keeping an Eye Open
    Keeping an Eye Open
    Essays on Art
    Julian Barnes
    978-1-101-87337-3
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 13, 2017
  • The Noise of Time
    The Noise of Time
    A Novel
    Julian Barnes
    978-1-101-97118-5
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 13, 2017
  • I Am Not Your Negro
    I Am Not Your Negro
    A Companion Edition to the Documentary Film Directed by Raoul Peck
    James Baldwin, Raoul Peck
    978-0-525-43469-6
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 07, 2017
  • A Decent Ride
    A Decent Ride
    Irvine Welsh
    978-1-101-97084-3
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 10, 2017
  • Mothering Sunday
    Mothering Sunday
    A Romance
    Graham Swift
    978-1-101-97172-7
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 10, 2017
  • Julieta (Movie Tie-in Edition)
    Julieta (Movie Tie-in Edition)
    Three Stories That Inspired the Movie
    Alice Munro
    978-0-525-43426-9
    $9.99 US
    Ebook
    Vintage
    Dec 13, 2016
  • Notwithstanding
    Notwithstanding
    Louis de Bernieres
    978-1-101-96987-8
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 18, 2016
  • A Strangeness in My Mind
    A Strangeness in My Mind
    A novel
    Orhan Pamuk
    978-0-307-74484-5
    $17.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 20, 2016
  • The Blue Guitar
    The Blue Guitar
    John Banville
    978-0-8041-7361-2
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Aug 09, 2016
  • The Dust That Falls from Dreams
    The Dust That Falls from Dreams
    A Novel
    Louis de Bernieres
    978-1-101-97000-3
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 26, 2016
  • Wind/Pinball
    Wind/Pinball
    Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 (Two Novels)
    Haruki Murakami
    978-0-8041-7014-7
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 03, 2016
  • England and Other Stories
    England and Other Stories
    Graham Swift
    978-1-101-87238-3
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 19, 2016
  • Odysseus Abroad
    Odysseus Abroad
    A novel
    Amit Chaudhuri
    978-1-101-97145-1
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 09, 2016
  • God Help the Child
    God Help the Child
    Toni Morrison
    978-0-307-74092-2
    $14.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 26, 2016
  • The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins
    The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins
    Irvine Welsh
    978-0-8041-7321-6
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 12, 2016
  • The Buried Giant
    The Buried Giant
    Kazuo Ishiguro
    978-0-307-45579-6
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 05, 2016
  • Amnesia
    Amnesia
    Peter Carey
    978-0-8041-7132-8
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Dec 08, 2015
  • Family Furnishings
    Family Furnishings
    Selected Stories, 1995-2014
    Alice Munro
    978-1-101-87235-2
    $18.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 15, 2015
  • A Wilderness Station
    A Wilderness Station
    Selected Stories, 1968-1994
    Alice Munro
    978-1-101-97036-2
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 15, 2015
  • The Prophet
    The Prophet
    Kahlil Gibran
    978-1-101-97078-2
    $9.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 21, 2015
  • A Map of Betrayal
    A Map of Betrayal
    A Novel
    Ha Jin
    978-0-8041-7036-9
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 07, 2015
  • The Zone of Interest
    The Zone of Interest
    Martin Amis
    978-0-8041-7289-9
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 07, 2015
  • The Walk Home
    The Walk Home
    A Novel
    Rachel Seiffert
    978-1-101-87343-4
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 23, 2015
  • Adultery
    Adultery
    Paulo Coelho
    978-1-101-87224-6
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 26, 2015
  • Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
    Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
    Haruki Murakami
    978-0-8041-7012-3
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 05, 2015
  • The Narrow Road to the Deep North
    The Narrow Road to the Deep North
    Richard Flanagan
    978-0-8041-7147-2
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 14, 2015
  • The Fires of Autumn
    The Fires of Autumn
    Irene Nemirovsky
    978-1-101-87227-7
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 17, 2015
  • The News: A User's Manual
    The News: A User's Manual
    Alain De Botton
    978-0-307-47683-8
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Dec 02, 2014
  • Falling Out of Time
    Falling Out of Time
    David Grossman
    978-0-345-80585-0
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Dec 02, 2014
  • The Man of Feeling
    The Man of Feeling
    Javier Marías
    978-0-8041-7259-2
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 07, 2014
  • Levels of Life
    Levels of Life
    Julian Barnes
    978-0-345-80658-1
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 01, 2014
  • Beer in the Snooker Club
    Beer in the Snooker Club
    Waguih Ghali
    978-0-8041-7074-1
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 10, 2014
  • Subtle Bodies
    Subtle Bodies
    Norman Rush
    978-1-4000-7713-7
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 03, 2014
  • Going Home Again
    Going Home Again
    Dennis Bock
    978-1-4000-9610-7
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 06, 2014
  • The Infatuations
    The Infatuations
    Javier Marías
    978-0-307-95073-4
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 22, 2014
  • Vintage Munro
    Vintage Munro
    Nobel Prize Edition
    Alice Munro
    978-0-8041-7356-8
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 22, 2014
  • Bombay Stories
    Bombay Stories
    Saadat Hasan Manto
    978-0-8041-7060-4
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 25, 2014
  • Paradise
    Paradise
    Toni Morrison
    978-0-8041-6988-2
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 11, 2014
  • The Blind Man's Garden
    The Blind Man's Garden
    Nadeem Aslam
    978-0-345-80285-9
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 28, 2014
  • All That Is
    All That Is
    A Novel
    James Salter
    978-1-4000-7842-4
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 28, 2014
  • The Tragedy of Mister Morn
    The Tragedy of Mister Morn
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-307-95066-6
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Dec 03, 2013
  • Middle C
    Middle C
    William H. Gass
    978-0-8041-6878-6
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Dec 03, 2013
  • Inheritance
    Inheritance
    Indira Ganesan
    978-0-8041-6924-0
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Nov 05, 2013
  • More Than I Love My Life
    More Than I Love My Life
    A novel
    David Grossman
    978-0-593-31259-9
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 12, 2022
  • The Living Sea of Waking Dreams
    The Living Sea of Waking Dreams
    A novel
    Richard Flanagan
    978-0-593-31370-1
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 26, 2022
  • Trio
    Trio
    A novel
    William Boyd
    978-0-593-31146-2
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 08, 2022
  • Klara and the Sun
    Klara and the Sun
    A novel
    Kazuo Ishiguro
    978-0-593-31129-5
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 01, 2022
  • Antiquities and Other Stories
    Antiquities and Other Stories
    Cynthia Ozick
    978-0-593-31276-6
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 01, 2022
  • Inside Story
    Inside Story
    A novel
    Martin Amis
    978-0-593-31171-4
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 22, 2022
  • Let Me Tell You What I Mean
    Let Me Tell You What I Mean
    Joan Didion
    978-0-593-31219-3
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 25, 2022
  • Medusa's Ankles
    Medusa's Ankles
    Selected Stories
    A. S. Byatt
    978-0-593-32158-4
    $28.00 US
    Hardcover
    Knopf
    Nov 23, 2021
  • Palimpsest
    Palimpsest
    A Memoir
    Gore Vidal
    978-0-593-31439-5
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Nov 16, 2021
  • Season of Anomy
    Season of Anomy
    Wole Soyinka
    978-0-593-46719-0
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 14, 2021
  • The Interpreters
    The Interpreters
    Wole Soyinka
    978-0-593-46721-3
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 14, 2021
  • Here We Are
    Here We Are
    A novel
    Graham Swift
    978-1-9848-9952-1
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Aug 10, 2021
  • Juneteenth (Revised)
    Juneteenth (Revised)
    Ralph Ellison
    978-0-593-31461-6
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 18, 2021
  • Think, Write, Speak
    Think, Write, Speak
    Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor
    Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov Literary Trust
    978-1-101-87370-0
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 09, 2021
  • The Wapshot Chronicle
    The Wapshot Chronicle
    John Cheever
    978-0-593-08177-8
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 02, 2021
  • The Wapshot Scandal
    The Wapshot Scandal
    John Cheever
    978-0-593-31289-6
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 02, 2021
  • Love in the Time of Cholera (Illustrated Edition)
    Love in the Time of Cholera (Illustrated Edition)
    Gabriel García Márquez
    978-0-593-31085-4
    $25.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 27, 2020
  • The Scandal of the Century
    The Scandal of the Century
    And Other Writings
    Gabriel García Márquez
    978-0-525-56680-9
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 15, 2020
  • Personal Writings
    Personal Writings
    Albert Camus
    978-0-525-56721-9
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Aug 04, 2020
  • Berta Isla
    Berta Isla
    A novel
    Javier Marías
    978-0-525-56312-9
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 07, 2020
  • Life for Sale
    Life for Sale
    Yukio Mishima
    978-0-525-56514-7
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 07, 2020
  • The Source of Self-Regard
    The Source of Self-Regard
    Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations
    Toni Morrison
    978-0-525-56279-5
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 14, 2020
  • Love Is Blind
    Love Is Blind
    A novel
    William Boyd
    978-0-525-56444-7
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 24, 2019
  • So Much Life Left Over
    So Much Life Left Over
    A Novel
    Louis de Bernieres
    978-0-525-56441-6
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 09, 2019
  • Myra Breckinridge
    Myra Breckinridge
    Gore Vidal
    978-0-525-56650-2
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 21, 2019
  • Warlight
    Warlight
    Michael Ondaatje
    978-0-525-56296-2
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 02, 2019
  • First Person
    First Person
    Richard Flanagan
    978-0-525-43577-8
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 05, 2019
  • The Only Story
    The Only Story
    A novel
    Julian Barnes
    978-0-525-56306-8
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 05, 2019
  • A Long Way from Home
    A Long Way from Home
    Peter Carey
    978-0-525-43599-0
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 05, 2019
  • The Rub of Time
    The Rub of Time
    Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage, 1994-2017
    Martin Amis
    978-1-4000-9599-5
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 22, 2019
  • I'm Not Here to Give a Speech
    I'm Not Here to Give a Speech
    Gabriel García Márquez
    978-1-101-91118-1
    $14.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 08, 2019
  • The Frolic of the Beasts
    The Frolic of the Beasts
    Yukio Mishima
    978-0-525-43415-3
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Nov 27, 2018
  • The Myth of Sisyphus
    The Myth of Sisyphus
    Albert Camus
    978-0-525-56445-4
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Nov 06, 2018
  • Dinner at the Center of the Earth
    Dinner at the Center of the Earth
    Nathan Englander
    978-0-525-43404-7
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 04, 2018
  • Between Eternities
    Between Eternities
    And Other Writings
    Javier Marías
    978-1-101-97211-3
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Aug 28, 2018
  • A Boy in Winter
    A Boy in Winter
    A Novel
    Rachel Seiffert
    978-0-8041-6880-9
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 10, 2018
  • The Red-Haired Woman
    The Red-Haired Woman
    Orhan Pamuk
    978-1-101-97423-0
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 10, 2018
  • Men Without Women
    Men Without Women
    Stories
    Haruki Murakami
    978-1-101-97452-0
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 01, 2018
  • The Golden Legend
    The Golden Legend
    A novel
    Nadeem Aslam
    978-1-101-97338-7
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 24, 2018
  • The Woman on the Stairs
    The Woman on the Stairs
    A Novel
    Bernhard Schlink
    978-1-101-91234-8
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 20, 2018
  • A Horse Walks Into a Bar
    A Horse Walks Into a Bar
    A novel
    David Grossman
    978-1-101-97349-3
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 16, 2018
  • South and West
    South and West
    From a Notebook
    Joan Didion
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