num_pages: 512
description: In 1804, Colonel Aaron Burr, Vice-President of the United States, shot and killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel. Three years later, on the order of President Thomas Jefferson, he was tried for treason: for plotting to dismember the United States. Gore Vidal, romping iconoclastically through American history, debunks, in this historical novel of Burr's life, the common and casually held notion of the man as a scoundrel and an adventurer. Instead he appears as one of the 'host of choice spirits' forced to live among coarse, materialistic, hypocritical people ? among them Jefferson and Hamilton. Here, the latter appears as a power-hungry 'parvenu' from the West Indies and the former as a semi-literate slave-owning tyrant. American politics, suggests Vidal, had a penchant for the vulgar. Even then. Veering backwards to the revolution and the early days of the republic, stopping at dinner-parties on the way, and reaching forward to the future, BURR is a novel about treason, both the particular and in general. For what, asks Vidal, really belongs to whom? What properly belongs to the Constitution, to the nation, to the family ?even to novelists and historians?
language: English
title: Burr
titlecomplete: Burr
characters: Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton
genres: Fiction, Historical, American, Politics, American Revolution, Literature, American History, Novels, Classics, Historical Fiction
ratings_count: 9865
places: The United States of America
series: Narratives of Empire
awards: awardedAt: 126259200000
name: National Book Award Finalist
category: Fiction
publisher: Abacus Books