num_pages: 416
description: 'History is gossip,' says a protagonist in Washington, D.C., 'but the trick is determining which gossip is history.' It is a trick that Gore Vidal has mastered in his ongoing chronicle of that circus of opportunism &amp; hypocrisy called American politics &amp; which he plays with renewed vigour in this expose of the nation's capital. Young Clay Overbury, Senator Burden Day's assistant, has a modest background &amp; immense ambitions. Extremely handsome, oozing charm &amp; seemingly dedicated to the Senator's cause, he is also duplicitous, conniving &amp; disloyal. But Enid Canford doesn't think so. She marries him, so providing the Sanford newspaper dynasty with a direct line to the Senator. Her father Blaise, at 1st loathing his son-in-law, later learns to love him--for all the wrong reasons. So begins this tale of lust &amp; ambition set in the Republic's high noon. From the late 1930s to Joe McCarthy's reign of terror, Vidal charts the seamy, sleazy side of Washington. Mixing sober history with nakedly Gothic melodrama, he provides an intoxicating cocktail of blackmail, betrayal, sexual ambivalence, lunacy &amp; conspiracy--in a word, politics.
language: English
title: Washington, DC
titlecomplete: Washington, DC (Narratives of a Golden Age)
characters: Enid Sanford, Burden Day, Blaise Sanford, Clay Overbury
genres: Historical, Literature, American, 20th Century, Novels, American History, Historical Fiction, Fiction, Politics, Contemporary
ratings_count: 1802
places: The United States of America
series: Narratives of Empire
publisher: Abacus Books