Gore Vidal has claimed to be the only American writer of his generation to evince any interest in our country’s (or any other country’s) history. It is typical of Vidal to go for the hyperbole, blithely ignoring the work of several well-known contemporaries; still, it must be admitted that he has a point. “Americans in general are not concerned with anything that happened before yesterday,” he has said, and American writers—certainly as compared to European ones—seem remarkably uninterested in the past.

Vidal, on the other hand, has made history his specialty, and over a period of about a quarter-century he created an idiosyncratic account of American history in his so-called American chronicle, a series of six novels that cover our past from the early nineteenth century to the McCarthy period: Washington, D.C. (1967), Burr (1973), 1876 (1976), Lincoln (1984), Empire (1987), and Hollywood (1990).

Vidal’s usual stance is that of the gleeful revisionist, energetically demolishing the patriotic pieties (and surely many deserve demolishing) that we were taught in school— the heroic vision of American history. Still, in the process of writing his chronicle he developed his own idées fixes on which he now harps as relentlessly as any schoolmarm.

His usual routine is to equate the United States with Rome, the promising, idealistic republic transformed into a bloated empire. Just when this transformation actually occurred in America is a question Vidal seems unable to settle. In Burr, he suggested that the Republic was doomed