But it is the naiveté of countless readers, like myself mediocrely educated through no real fault of their own except that they were not born into better schools, that the novelist must overcome in weaving his portrait of the Great American President. Of course, mature historians scoff at this notion, and so does Vidal. And we certainly didn’t learn anything other than the notion that old “Honest Abe” (who, if we take Vidal at face value, was anything but) fought a war to free the slaves and enshrine the glorious promise of the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution in a shining new reality.

We were not taught about the regular and disastrous tactical failures of the Union Army under Southron-sympathising generals like McClellan in the early years of the war, nor of how close many of those battles came to completely undermining Northern confidence in the Greenback dollars that seem to have largely funded the war. Surprisingly, battles bored the younger me (now, they terrify me), so the litany of learning around the American Civil War (Bull Run, Second Bull Run, Vicksburg, Gettysburg, Atlanta, et cetera) didn’t do much for me.

That is no doubt due to the fact that in the 70s and 80s, when I completed much of my schooling, public school curricula still bent in the direction of a legendary and cinematically simplistic view of history (where any history was taught at all). Lincoln: A Novel, by Gore Vidal (Random House, Inc., 1984)ĭespite having been educated largely in America, I can’t say that I knew much of anything of Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln by Gore Vidal