CONTENTS

Title Page

Introduction by Jay Parini


PART ONE: READING THE WRITERS

Novelists and Critics of the 1940s (1953)

Tarzan Revisited (1963)

The Top Ten Best-Sellers According to the Sunday New York Times as of January 7, 1973 (1973)

French Letters: Theories of the New Novel (1967)

American Plastic: The Matter of Fiction (1974)

Calvino’s Novels (1974)

The Hacks of Academe (1976)

Some Memories of the Glorious Bird and an Earlier Self (1976)

Edmund Wilson: This Critic and This Gin and These Shoes (1980)

William Dean Howells (1983)

Dawn Powell: The American Writer (1987)

Montaigne (1992)

Rabbit’s Own Burrow (1996)


PART TWO: READING THE WORLD

Passage to Egypt (1963)

Pornography (1966)

The Holy Family (1967)

Homage to Daniel Shays (1972)

Pink Triangle and Yellow Star (1981)

Theodore Roosevelt: An American Sissy (1981)

The Second American Revolution (1981)

The National Security State (1988)

Monotheism and Its Discontents (1992)

Black Tuesday (2002)

State of the Union, 2004


About the Author

Also by Gore Vidal

Copyright