New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1967. Thomas Mallon has also written about the Senate in some of his other historical novels his most recent work, Fellow Travelers, focuses on the McCarthy era. Set in 1877, the year the moons of Mars were discovered, the novel includes other real-life figures as Blanche Kelso Bruce, the first African American to serve a full term in the Senate. Naval Observatory, and Hugh Allison, an astronomer. He seems unlikely to appear in a romantic novel but does just that in this story of Cynthia May, a Civil War widow who lands a job at the U.S. Senate from 1867 to 1881, controlled a vast patronage machine and was contemptuous of efforts at civil service reform.

Roscoe Conkling, who represented New York in the U.S. Yet, he tempers this portrait by depicting McCarthy as inadvertently undermining the anti-communist cause that he promoted. Buckley defies conventional wisdom by presenting the senator as a sympathetic figure. Using the perspective of an idealistic speechwriter looking back at his tenure with McCarthy forty years later, William F. Edgar Hoover, and Secretary of State Dean Acheson join Senator Joe McCarthy and a fictional cast of characters in this recreation of the early 1950s, when fear of communism dominated the national consciousness. Historical figures such as Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, FBI Director J. The Redhunter: A Novel Based on the Life of Senator Joe McCarthy. During his youth, Vidal lived with his grandfather in Washington, D.C., spending hours reading the Congressional Record to the senator, who was blind. Also making an appearance is Senator Thomas Pryor Gore of Oklahoma, the author's grandfather. Harding, William Randolph Hearst, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. In Hollywood, he draws upon the worlds of politics and show business to assemble a cast that includes Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Grant, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Van Buren interact with Vidal's fictional characters. In these books, which are often referred to as the American Chronicles, historical figures such as Aaron Burr, Ulysses S. New York: Random House, 1990.īetween 19 Gore Vidal published seven historical novels that tell America's story from the Revolutionary War to the end of the 20th century. Hollywood: A Novel of America in the 1920s.

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