Lincoln: A Novel - Hardcover

Vidal, Gore

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0394528956 ISBN 13: 9780394528953

Publisher: Random House, 1984

Synopsis

Lincoln is the cornerstone of Gore Vidal's fictional American chronicle, which includes Burr, 1876, Washington, D.C., Empire, and Hollywood. It opens early on a frozen winter morning in 1861, when President-elect Abraham Lincoln slips into Washington, flanked by two bodyguards. The future president is in disguise, for there is talk of a plot to murder him. During the next four years there will be numerous plots to murder this man who has sworn to unite a disintegrating nation. 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. In this profoundly moving novel, a work of epic proportions and intense human sympathy, Lincoln is observed by his loved ones and his rivals. 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. 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.
   With a new Introduction by the author.

About this title

Review:

An astonishing achievement, the greatest historical novel of our time (Allan Massie, THE SCOTSMAN)

Reasoned, judicious, straightforward and utterly convincing ... an astonishing achievement (NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW)

Magnificent (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

Book Description:

* The second novel in the chronology of Vidal's epic NARRATIVES OF EMPIRE, embodying the passage of American history.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 1984
• ISBN 10: 0394528956
• ISBN 13: 9780394528953
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1