Politics and World Affairs
Book Details

Inventing a Nation

Washington, Adams, Jefferson

Gore Vidal

Inventing a Nation is Gore Vidal’s testament to the America he loves and mourns, to its continued promise and troubled future.

Opinion

“Inventing a Nation is the polished offspring of Vidal’s erudite acerbity coupled with disgust at the present US administration”
“With the coolly beguiling, irony-laced perspective that has made him one of America’s great men of letters, Vidal chronicles the compromises, alliances, intrigues, egos and objectives of the various protagonists who significantly influenced the US’s early tentative steps as a nation”
(Bill Deane, The Canberra Times, 8/1/05)

“Vidal’s insider status gives an edge to his critical assessments when he steps outside the circle to scrutinize what his friends have been up to.”
“Vidal cannot bear to write or speak a dull sentence and prefers vivid images to abstruse analysis.”
“an unblinking view of our national heroes by one who cherishes them, warts and all.”
“Inventing a Nation is a cri de coeur from one who has seen the wolf and cried in vain.”
(Edmund S. Morgan, The New York Review, Vol.1, No.20, December 2003)

About this Title

‘… a sly tract for the times.’
The New York Review of Books

Inventing a Nation is Gore Vidal’s testament to the America he loves and mourns, to its continued promise and troubled future.

Vidal, a master stylist of American literature and one of the most acute observers of American life and history, turns his immense literary and historiographic talent to a portrait of the first three presidents of the United States, George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson.

Vidal’s splendid and percipient prose animates key moments of decision in the birth of the American nation, and we come to know these men in new ways—their opinions of each other and the wider world, and their concerns about creating a viable democracy. Vidal brings America’s founding fathers to life and illuminates the force and weight of the documents they wrote, the speeches they gave, and the institutions of government they fashioned.

As one of Australia’s leading politicians, Bob Carr, writes in the introduction to this special Australian edition: ‘In these shining pages Gore Vidal answers a question that puzzled George Washington himself: what has gone wrong with America?’

About the Author

GORE VIDAL—novelist, playwright, screenwriter, politician, and friend to many of the figures who shaped politics and culture in the second half of the twentieth century—invariably provides a fresh perspective on American history and power. His books include United States: Essays, 1952–1992, for which he received the National Book Award; Burr: A Novel; Lincoln; 1876; The American Presidency; and the recent Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace.

BOB CARR—thinker and politician—is the energetic founder of the Chester
A. Arthur Society, formed to honour one of America's most obscure
presidents, and the thrice-elected Premier of New South Wales.

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978-0-522-85138-0