Our culture has inherited a bias against the presentation of ideas in literary form.
Romantic feeling is more highly valued than rationalism, and irony has easily vanquished argument.
In drama and fiction, the genre of wisdom literature died with the Age of Reason. And yet, as Fred Kaplan points out, Gore Vidal has been a writer of ideas, his artistry driven by his intellect, for more than 50 years. After all, the man has been nothing if not prolific. Each work has a brief foreword, and the book also has an introduction that helps place Vidal's career in context. The selection is good, but one piece I missed was the long essay Vidal did on the Adams family.