Live From Golgotha: Gore Vidal's Second "Fifth Gospel"

Abstract

In 1989, after the publication of Hollywood, his twenty-first novel, Gore Vidal talked of his projected next novel, a semi-autobiographical account of the United States between the years 1945 and 1950 (Delaney). This novel, to be entitled The Golden Age, would have been, and may yet appear as, the seventh in Vidal's sequence of novels about American political history—the sequence which began with Burr in 1974. However, when his twenty-second novel appeared in 1992, it was not The Golden Age but Live From Golgotha, subtitled The Gospel According to Gore Vidal.