And there are at least 10 more crowding in close. But there are actually three other characters competing for center stage: Teddy himself, William Randolph Hearst, and the fictional Caroline Sanford. The central character, at least in theory, is John Hay, once Lincoln's private secretary, now secretary of state first under McKinley and then under Roosevelt.
Having written about Aaron Burr and Lincoln and Grant and the second Roosevelt, now he has turned to the age of McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. Certainly his new novel, Empire, is.Įmpire is the fifth of Gore Vidal's historical novels about American politics. The answer, of course, is all of the above - though as a writer he is nearer, I think, to Updike than to Krantz. Is he famous Judith Krantz-style, because he has so deft a finger on the public pulse, and hence so assured a place on best-seller lists? Or is he, like John Updike and Philip Roth, famous because he is a novelist of undoubted distinction? Vidal has run for Congress on the Democratic ticket in New York, tried for a senatorial nomination in California, been secretary of state-designate of the People's Party.) What's he famous for? Is he famous for being famous, like any other TV personality or politician? (Mr. OF WELL-KNOWN American writers, Gore Vidal is surely the hardest to classify. With a new Introduction by the author.EMPIRE By Gore Vidal Random House. "Like the earlier novels in his historical cycle, Empire is a wonderfully vivid documentary drama." Vidal demonstrates a political imagination and insider's sagacity equaled by no other practicing fiction writer," said The New York Times Book Review. In their struggles for power the lives of brother and sister become intertwined with those of Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt, as well as Astors, Vanderbilts, and Whitneys-all incarnations of America's Gilded Age.
From the back offices of her Washington newspaper, Caroline confronts the two men who threaten to thwart her ambition: William Randolph Hearst and his protégé, Blaise Sanford, Caroline's half brother. One of Vidal's most in-spired creations, she is an embodiment of the complex, vigorous young nation. While America struggles to define its destiny, beautiful and ambitious Caroline Sanford fights to control her own fate. Empire, the fourth novel in Gore Vidal's monumental six-volume chronicle of the American past, is his prodigiously detailed portrait of the United States at the dawn of the twentieth century as it begins to emerge as a world power.
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