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  The Union Justified the Means
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ContributorCraverguy 
Last EditedCraverguy  Sep 27, 2009 05:17pm
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CategoryReview
AuthorJoyce Carol Oates
MediaNewspaper - New York Times
News DateSunday, June 3, 1984 06:00:00 PM UTC0:0
DescriptionProdigious Gore Vidal - the author, with this massive and carefully researched volume on Lincoln's Presidency, of some 25 books (19 novels, five collections of essays, one collection of short stories) and five plays; so kaleidoscopic in his interests, his energies and the remarkable range of his talents, the Vidal voice is as readily discernible in the comic masterpiece Myra Breckinridge as in the somber meditation upon mortality Two Sisters, as fully present in those critical essays in which, out of habit perhaps, he routinely excoriates experimentation in fiction, as it is in an experimental attempt of his own, last year's Duluth.

So zestfully does Mr. Vidal contradict himself in his practice as a writer, one is not surprised to read, as long ago as 1967, that he has all but given up on prose fiction ("three centuries is quite long enough for any literary form") while being told that he is at work on a "chronicle" of novels dealing with American history. If Mr. Vidal the polemicist is frequently at odds with, and not particularly nourishing to, Mr. Vidal the writer of fiction, one should not hold it against him. Consistency, as Whitman knew, is one of the minor American virtues.

Now comes Mr. Vidal's Lincoln with its necessary but somewhat misleading subtitle, "A Novel," certain to be a controversial work among literary critics, if not among historians (surely the history cannot be faulted, as it comes with the imprimatur of one of our most eminent Lincoln scholars, David Herbert Donald of Harvard), or among readers with a temperamental distrust of fiction's usual strategies (they will love Lincoln).
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