Burr

Gore Vidal

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Aaron Burr (1756-1836) was a hero of the American Revolution, served as vice-president under Thomas Jefferson, took the life of Alexander Hamilton in a duel and was tried for treason when Jefferson accused him of plotting to make an empire of his own in the western territories. This novel is in the form of a memoir, told partly by Burr at the end of a long life and partly by a young journalist with whom Burr confides. The portraits of the major characters - Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, the Madisons, Jackson, Van Buren - are drawn from their own words and from the observations of there contemporaries. The result is a brilliantly realized and enormously engaging work of fiction which accurately describes struggles the endless intrigues of the new United States. Burr himself is a subject of great fascination, a dark shadow over the early nation, who lived out his long life partly as a suspected traitor and partly as one of the most heroic and colorful of the founding fathers - a character as complex and ambiguous as America itself. The series of battles at Quebec and Monmouth Courthouse, the long winter at Valley Forge, are done with great vigor and clarity; the political intrigues are rendered as if they were today's headlines, the characters as precise and alive as they must have seemed at the time. Burr is the rarest of books - a powerfully readable historical novel which at the same time re-creates with scrupulous accuracy and the originality of a major historical imagination the most significant years in the history of America.