A collection of essays taken from 40 years of work by the bestselling and celebrated Gore VidalGore Vidal''s reputation as America''s finest essayist is an enduring one. This collection, chosen by the author from 40 years of work, contains about two-thirds of what he published in various magazines and journals. He has divided the essays into three categories, or states. State of the art covers literature, including novelists and critics, bestsellers, pieces on Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Suetonius, Nabokov and Montaigne (a previously uncollected essay from 1992). State of the union deals with politics and public life: sex, drugs, money, Abraham Lincoln, Eleanor Roosevelt, The Holy Family (his essay on the Kennedys), Nixon, and finally Monotheism and its Discontents , a scathing critique of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. In state of being, we are given personal responses to people and events: recollections of his childhood, E. Nesbit, Tarzan, Tennessee Williams and Anais Nin.''Magnificent... irresistible from beginning to end'' The Times''All the Vidals are on display in this glittering showcase'' Guardian''Vidal is the outstanding literary radical of America'' Melvyn Bragg