WHEN ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S wartime secretaries, John Hay and John G. Nicolay, serialized their life of the President in Century magazine in 1885, Lincoln’s old friend and law partner William H. Herndon did not like it. The articles were too reverential, he thought, too Republican, too everlastingly long. But worse than that, he added, the authors “handle things with silken gloves & a ‘cammel hair pencil’: they do not write with an iron pen.”

It seems clear that when Gore Vidal set out to write his big new novel, Lincoln, nearly a century later, he planned to wield the sort of ruthless weapon Herndon had in mind. Vidal’s astonishing output of eighteen novels, a volume of short stories, five plays, and five books of essays and criticism already included three historical novels—Washington, D.C., Burr, and 1876—in which he offered his elegantly rendered but distinctly polemical version of our past, and in Burr, the best-known of these, he had managed to engrave a startling portrait of Thomas Jefferson as so unrelievedly untrustworthy an opportunist that Dumas Malone, Jefferson’s biographer, denounced the book as not merely inaccurate but downright “pernicious.”

Full Story >>