Description: This is the best of Gore Vidal, in one volume, for longtime fans as well as students. It brings together his fiction and the cream of his many famous essays, as well as a selection of previously unpublished letters that illuminate the work with wit and thoughtful irreverence. The selections include several short stories from A Thirsty Evil, excerpts from his short novels (Julian, Messiah, Creation, and Live from Golgotha), the whole of Myra Breckenridge, a chronologically connected sequence from the six history novels (Burr, Lincoln, 1876, Empire, Hollywood, and Washington, D.C.), and essays on the movies, pornography, the Kennedys, Henry James, the Church, and himself, among other subjects. Previously uncollected essays on Eleanor Roosevelt, John Updike, Mark Twain, and the end of history are also included.

Fred Kaplan, the biographer of James, Dickens, and Carlyle, has provided an Introduction and explanatory texts.

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