United States: Essays 1952-1992
by Gore Vidal
Summary
United States gathers four decades of Gore Vidal's essays into one enormous volume, and it makes the case, which even his enemies largely conceded, that the essay was the form in which he had no American rival. Vidal organized a lifetime of pieces into three long movements, on literature, on politics, and on himself, and the range is part of the argument: readings of Montaigne, Henry James, and Italo Calvino beside demolitions of bestseller lists and academic fashion; the political essays that built his black legend of the American empire, the national security state, and the ruling class he was born inside and spent a career informing on; and the personal pieces, wicked and elegiac by turns, on Tennessee Williams, Eleanor Roosevelt, the Kennedys, and the Hollywood and Washington of his youth. The prose is the attraction, patrician, epigrammatic, and lethal, and the point of view never wavers: the republic has been swallowed by the empire, the money has swallowed the politics, and the literary culture is amusing itself to death, all delivered with a wit that makes the pessimism bracing rather than gloomy. The collection runs to 114 essays, about two thirds of what he had published in magazines over the forty years, chosen by Vidal himself. The collection won the 1993 National Book Award for Nonfiction, the only major American literary prize for a single book that Vidal ever received, an irony he savored publicly, and it remains the essential Vidal, the place where readers who know the novels or the feuds discover the working critic who outlasted both.
Historical Context & Significance
The award came in 1993, when Vidal was sixty eight and had been a professional writer for almost half a century, and the spectacle of the establishment finally garlanding its most dedicated scourge delighted everyone including him. The collection fixed his reputation's final shape: the novels get argued about, the essays get reread. Its three sections, State of the Art on literature, State of the Union on politics and public life, and State of Being on people and events, still organize how readers approach it. His running subjects, the imperial presidency, surveillance, money in politics, made the book look more prophetic each decade after, and anthologies of the American essay now treat it as a summit of the form. A selected edition later carved a smaller path through the same material, but readers who want Vidal whole start with the big book.