Convinced that corruption and hypocrisy are fast becoming entrenched in American government, and that Jefferson has determined to ruin him, Burr decides to abandon the “great experiment,” and to try to found a “true civilization” in Mexico. Although he shares with the others a drive for power and conquest, Aaron Burr emerges as a man of complex brilliance and vision, a kind of tragic hero undone by the intensity of his own ambition. The formative years of the United States, as they are protrayed in the novel, are a time of passionate rivalry among men eager for economic and political power, and it is in this context that an enmity arises among Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson, based on their mutual and competitive scramble for the spoils of the Revolution. Schuyler accepts the secret commission, and his subsequent preoccupation with questions of paternity and illegitimacy provides a counterpart to the novel's fundamental concern with the “origins” of America itself.

Schuyler has also been approached by political enemies of Jackson's Vice President, Martin Van Buren, to write an anonymous pamphlet proving that Van Buren is the illegitimate son of Aaron Burr. The narrative moves back and forth between Aaron Burr's first-person “history” of the early days of the Republic (“as told to” the narrator, Schuyler, his young biographer), and Schuyler's own rendering of the contemporary political “tone” of the Jacksonian era. Burr, Vidal's latest work, is the fourth of his novels to achieve best-sellerdom.īurr is a historical novel set in the 1830's. In 1946, at the age nineteen, he wrote Williwaw, his first novel, and his subsequent output, including eight novels, numerous plays for the stage and for television, short stories, and an abundance of essays on a wide range of subjects, has been both prolific and varied. Gore Vidal once described himself as a “border lord” in the “dying kingdom of literature.” While the kingdom may in fact be dying, Vidal's rank in it is of course far more baronial than his modest trope suggests.

Burr by Gore Vidal