![]() Schuyler accepts the secret commission, and his subsequent preoccupation with questions of paternity and illegitimacy provides a counterpart to the novel's fundamental concern with the “origins” of America itself. Schuyler has also been approached by political enemies of Jackson's Vice President, Martin Van Buren, to write an anonymous pamphlet proving that Van Buren is the illegitimate son of Aaron Burr. The narrative moves back and forth between Aaron Burr's first-person “history” of the early days of the Republic (“as told to” the narrator, Schuyler, his young biographer), and Schuyler's own rendering of the contemporary political “tone” of the Jacksonian era. ![]() ![]() Burr, Vidal's latest work, is the fourth of his novels to achieve best-sellerdom.īurr is a historical novel set in the 1830's. In 1946, at the age nineteen, he wrote Williwaw, his first novel, and his subsequent output, including eight novels, numerous plays for the stage and for television, short stories, and an abundance of essays on a wide range of subjects, has been both prolific and varied. Gore Vidal once described himself as a “border lord” in the “dying kingdom of literature.” While the kingdom may in fact be dying, Vidal's rank in it is of course far more baronial than his modest trope suggests. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |