![]() ![]() With their broad canvas and sprawling cast of fictional and historical characters, these novels present a panorama of American politics and imperialism, as interpreted by one of our most. Veering backwards to the revolution and the early days of the republic, stopping at dinner-parties on the way, and reaching forward to the future, Burr is a novel about treason, both the particular and in general. Burr is the first novel in Gore Vidals Narratives of Empire series, which spans the history of the United States from the Revolution to post-World War II. American politics, suggests Vidal, had a penchant for the vulgar. Here, the latter appears as a power-hungry 'parvenu' from the West Indies and the former as a semi-literate slave-owning tyrant. ![]() Read more among coarse, materialistic, hypocritical people, among them Jefferson and Hamilton. Instead he appears as one of the 'host of choice spirits' forced to live. Gore Vidal, romping iconoclastically through American history, debunks, in this historical novel of Burr's life, the common and casually held notion of the man as a scoundrel and an adventurer. Three years later, on the order of President Thomas Jefferson, he was tried for treason: for plotting to dismember the United States. ![]() In 1804, Colonel Aaron Burr, Vice-President of the United States, shot and killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel. Gore Vidal's classic novel of Aaron Burr - the man who shot Alexander Hamilton. In the political world, a gifted politician without a purpose becomes odious after a time and Burr was a man without a purpose. ![]() The first novel in the chronology of Vidal's epic NARRATIVES OF EMPIRE, embodying the passage of American history. ![]()
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