Volume 31, Number 12 · July 19, 1984
The Central Man
By Harold Bloom
Lincoln: A Novel
by Gore Vidal
Random House, 657 pp., $19.95
Walt Whitman elegized Lincoln as 'the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands.' 'The actual Lincoln was cold and deliberate, reflective and brilliant,' according to Gore Vidal's brief meditation on the martyr president in The Second American Revolution and Other Essays: 1976–1982. That somber 'Note' by Vidal gave us a Lincoln 'at heart…a fatalist, a materialist' who 'knew when to wait; when to act.' This is the Lincoln of Vidal's superb novel, celebrated by the author as the master politician who invented what is now in crisis, the American nation-state.
Review, 2966 words
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