" Gore Vidal wasn't what I set out to be...," Gore Vidal quipped in the 18 November 1974 Newsweek, "but I don't mind what I've become." What he has become is one of America's preeminent novelists, a prolific writer whose novels and collections of essays have sold in excess of thirty million copies. His historical novels, especially the novels of the American Chronicle, are among the most accomplished and artful work in the genre by a living author. His Myra/Myron novels are classic works of camp sensibility, and his essays perfectly express his role of American cultural critic. These considerable achievements tend to be underestimated largely because of the variety of Vidal's writerly impulses, as if he had somehow failed to fix upon his essential being as a writer. He is viewed by Mitchell S. Ross as a "detoured politician," by Russell Jacoby as a last intellectual, and by Bernard...