Vidal’s portrait of the president is at once intimate and monumental, stark and complex, drawn with the wit, grace, and authority of one of the great historical novelists. The cast of characters is almost Dickensian: politicians, generals, White House aides, newspapermen, Northern and Southern conspirators, amiably evil bankers, and a wife slowly going mad. In this profoundly moving novel, a work of epic proportions and intense human sympathy, Lincoln is observed by his loved ones and his rivals. Lincoln is a masterwork of historical fiction, in which Gore Vidal combines a comprehensive knowledge of Civil War America with 20th-century literary technique, probing the minds and motives of the men surrounding Abraham Lincoln, including personal secretary John Hay and cheming cabinet members William Seward and Salmon P. Isolated in a ramshackle White House in the center of a proslavery city, Lincoln presides over a fragmenting government as Lee’s armies beat at the gates. During the next four years there will be numerous plots to murder this man who has sworn to unite a disintegrating nation. The future president is in disguise, for there is talk of a plot to murder him. Vidals historical novel of Lincolns presidency, part of his Narratives of Empire series.
Square and firmly bound, clean internally. Brown cloth with gilt and bronze lettering and rules on the spine and front board. Fine in a Fine jacket, unclipped (19.95). It opens early on a frozen winter morning in 1861, when President-elect Abraham Lincoln slips into Washington, flanked by two bodyguards. Inscribed by Vidal on the half-title page. Lincoln is the cornerstone of Gore Vidal’s fictional American chronicle, which includes Burr, 1876, Washington, D.C., Empire, and Hollywood.
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