The winner of the National Book Award and many other honors, Gore Vidal is one of America's best regarded novelists and essayists. Throughout his career, Gore Vidal has rubbed shoulders and crossed swords with many of the foremost cultural and political figures of our century: from Jack Kennedy to Jack Kerouac, Truman Capote to William F. Buckley.
Over a twenty-five period, Gore Vidal created a series of seven novels, which together are referred to as his American Chronicle novels. These novels capture American history in fiction in a way in which few writers have attempted, let alone succeeded.
Burr is the second volume in the series. A hero of the American Revolution, Aaron Burr (1756-1836) served as vice president under Thomas Jefferson, took the life of Alexander Hamilton in a duel in 1804, and was later tried for treason when Jefferson accused him of plotting to make an empire of his own in the western territories. Told partly by Aaron Burr at the end of his long life and partly by a young journalist in whom Burr confides, this brilliantly imagined memoir, based on fact, is an enormously engaging work of fiction that treats the political intrigues of the new United States as if they were today's headlines.
