1876; A Novel
New York: Ballantine, 1977. First Ballantine Books Edition [stated]. Second printing [stated]. Mass market paperback. [4], 443, [1] pages. Cover has some wear and soiling. Small tear to front cover at bottom near spine. Slightly cocked. Eugene Luther Gore Vidal (born Eugene Louis Vidal; October 3, 1925 – July 31, 2012) was an American writer and public intellectual known for his epigrammatic wit, and polished style of writing. He was born to a political family. He was a Democratic Party politician who twice sought elected office; first to the United States House of Representatives, then to the U.S. Senate. As a political commentator and essayist, Vidal's principal subject was the history of the United States and its society, especially how the foreign policy reduced the country to a decadent empire. His political and cultural essays were published in The Nation, the New Statesman, the New York Review of Books, and Esquire magazines. Gore Vidal's topical debates on sex, politics, and religion with other intellectuals and writers occasionally turned into quarrels with the likes of William F. Buckley Jr. and Norman Mailer. As a novelist Vidal explored the nature of corruption in public and private life. His polished and erudite style of narration readily evoked the time and place of his stories, and perceptively delineated the psychology of his characters. Vidal re-created in Julian the imperial world of Julian the Apostate (r. AD 361–63), the Roman emperor who used general religious toleration to re-establish pagan polytheism to counter the political subversion of Christian monotheism. Myra Breckinridge explores the mutability of gender role and sexual orientation as being social constructs established by social mores. 1876 is the third historical novel in Gore Vidal's Narratives of Empire series. It was published in 1976 and details the events of a year described by Vidal himself as "probably the low point in our republic's history." The novel is written in the form of a journal written by Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler who has recently returned to the United States after more than 30 years in Europe, where he married into minor Napoleonic nobility; he is accompanied by his beautiful young widowed daughter Emma, the Princesse d'Agrigente, who immediately becomes the darling of New York high society. Despite his fame and affluent image, Schuyler finds work as a journalist because his wealth has been destroyed by the 1873 monetary crisis and his daughter's late husband has left her penniless. Schuyler also supports the Democratic candidate, Samuel J. Tilden, Governor of New York, because he hopes to secure himself a diplomatic position with the incoming administration that will enable him to return to Europe. The early chapters detail the Schuylers' introduction into New York society and the engagement between Emma and John Day Apgar, a wealthy but rather dull young lawyer and scion of a leading New York family. The later chapters chronicle Schuyler's sojourn in Washington, DC and Emma's growing friendship with the wealthy Denise Sanford and her boorish husband William. Emma and Denise become close friends, but after Denise dies in childbirth Emma breaks off her engagement to Apgar and marries Sanford instead. The political backdrop to the story is the 1876 presidential election, a close run contest between Tilden and the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. Tilden won the popular vote, but there was a dispute over the results in four states, which were Louisiana, Oregon, South Carolina and Florida. In Florida, the Republican leaders of the State and the Electoral Commission initially reported a victory for Tilden, before deciding that in fact Hayes had won. Vidal builds up to this historic crisis through the activities of a mixed cast of historical and fictional characters, some of the latter having previously appeared in Burr, or having descended from characters in that novel. Condition: Good.
Keywords: Historical; Fiction, Election of 1876, Centennial, Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler, Princesse d'Agrigente, Samuel J. Tilden, John Day Apgar, Denise Sanford, William Sanford, Rutherford B. Hayes, Electoral Commission
[Book #85702]
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