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Aug 01, 2000 | ISBN 9780375708756 Buy
Mar 23, 2011 | ISBN 9780307784223 Buy
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Available from:
Aug 01, 2000 | ISBN 9780375708756
Mar 23, 2011 | ISBN 9780307784223
"Wicked and provocative…Vidal’s purview of Hollywood in one of its golden ages is fascinating." —Chicago TribuneIn his brilliant and dazzling new novel, Gore Vidal sweeps us into one of the most fascinating periods of American political and social change. The time is 1917. In Washington, President Wilson is about to lead the United States into the Great War. In California, a new industry is born that will transform America: moving pictures. Here is history as only Gore Vidal can re-create it: brimming with intrigue and scandal, peopled by the greats of the silver screen and American politics, from Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks to Franklin D. Roosevelt and the author’s own grandfather, the blind Senator Gore. With Hollywood, Vidal once again proves himself a superb storyteller and a perceptive chronicler of human nature’s endless deceptions.
Hollywood marks the fifth episode in Gore Vidal’s "Narratives of Empire," his celebrated series of six historical novels that form his extended biography of the United States. It is 1917, and President Woodrow Wilson is about to lead the country into the Great War in Europe. In California, a new industry is born that will irreversibly transform America. Caroline Sanford, the alluring heroine of Empire, discovers the power of moving pictures to manipulate reality as she vaults to screen stardom under the name of Emma Traxler. Just as Caroline must balance her two lives–West Coast movie star and East Coast newspaper publisher and senator’s mistress–so too must America balance its two power centers: Hollywood and Washington. Here is history as only Gore Vidal can re-create it: brimming with intrigue and scandal, peopled by the greats of the silver screen and American politics. "Hollywood shimmers with the illusion of politics and the politics of illusion," wrote the Chicago Sun-Times. "A wonderfully literate and consistently impressive work of fiction that clearly belongs on a shelf with Vidal’s best," said The New York Times Book Review. With a new Introduction by the 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,… More about Gore Vidal
" Wicked and provocative. . . . Vidal’s purview of Hollywood in one of its golden ages is fascinating."–Tom Tryon" Vidal succeeds in making his history alive and plausible."–The New York Times" Vidal’s originality derives from his as-surance that he can create and command the American history of his novels, as much as he can their imaginary components. No other American writer I know of has Vidal’s sense of national proprietorship. He summons the entire American scene into his confident voice. Vidal’s presump-tions work marvelously well for hisintentions."–Richard Poirier,The New York Review of BooksAlso available from the Modern Library:Burr ¸ Lincoln ¸ 1876 ¸ Empire ¸ Washington, D.C.
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