The Golden Age - Rilegato

Praise for Gore Vidal and His Narratives of the American Empire:  "Vidal has no peers at breathing movement and laughter into the historical past."
-Time

"If Gore Vidal were not such a brilliantly witty and ruthlessly irreverent novelist, we would be more ready to recognize him as the fine historian he is. Nowhere among his impressive historical novels does he bring together these talents with more penetrating bravado than in this gripping and illuminating dissection of the American empire at high tide."
-Ronald Steel

"Vidal writes so well that you find yourself holding your breath over something that is a foregone conclusion...Vidal's talent makes the bloated corrupters of Washington live in a way that history books don't."                                                                    -Boston Globe

"It is probably impossible to be an American and not be impressed by Vidal's telescoping of our early history."                                                                              -The New Yorker

"Vidal is a masterly American historical novelist...Vidal's imagination of American politics, then and now, is so powerful as to compel awe."
-Harold Bloom, New York Review of Books

"No living American surpasses Gore Vidal in the difficult art of the historical novel...He has re-created American history...with an immediacy, color and detail that [are] denied the historian."
-Michael Beschloss, Chicago Tribune

"Mr. Vidal demonstrates a political imagination and insider's sagacity equaled by no other practicing fiction writer I can think of."
-New York Times Book Review

"Our greatest living historical novelist."
-Anthony Burgess

"[Vidal] deals with issues that most other novelists (and historians) are reluctant to confront...talks straight about important matters, so it is perhaps true that we have to come to terms with Vidal if we are to do justice to ourselves. That is the power of the man.  As with all the great ones. He has always annoyed us because he will not allow us to evade the issues."                                    
-William Appleman Williams, In These Times

Gore Vidal is the author of twenty-two novels, five plays, many screenplays and short stories, more than two hundred essays, and a memoir.  Two of his American empire novels, Lincoln and 1876, were the subject of cover stories in Time and Newsweek, respectively. In 1993, a collection of his criticism, United States: Essays 1952-1992, won the National Book Award. He received an award from the Cannes Film Festival for best screenplay for The Best Man. He divides his time between Ravello, Italy, and Los Angeles.