Заглавието на български език:
Юлиан (1981)
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На задната корица:
Seventeen years after the death of the eccentric fourth-century Roman Emperor Julian, two ancient, bitchy contemporaries intemperately tampered with the journals he intended to be his autobiography." The result of that fictional premise is this fictional masterpiece - a recreation of the Roman Empire teetering on the crux of Christianity and ruled by an emperor who was an inveterate dabbler in arcane hocus-pocus, a prig, a bigot and a dazzling and brilliant leader who saw Jesus as a 'rabble-rousing carpenter' and churches as 'charnel houses'. His two editors - armed with arch remarks, catty asides, ribald jokes and gossip galore - have both a histrionic attitude to facts and a healthy interest in Sex, Power and Politics.
On one level Julian is a classical blockbuster. Here are soldiers shouting and banging their shields; people leaping into beds not their own; citizens of Antioch yelling, cheering, intriguing and milling about; sensations, miracles and omens abounding. Yet here too is an extraordinary and accurate account of a crucial epoch in the development of our civilisation, and an invitation to consider the alarming notion that behind every recorded historical fact lies a writer - and an imagination.
High entertainment'
NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
'Historical fiction in the true, honourable sense ... full of richly wrought detail'
WALL STREET JOURNAL
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About the Author
Gore Vidal wrote his first novel, Williwaw (1946), at the age of nineteen while overseas in World War II. During four decades as a writer, Vidal has written novels, plays, short stories, and essays. He has also been a political activist. As a Democratic candidate for Congress from upstate New York, he received the most votes of any Democrat in a half-century. From 1970 to 1972 he was co-chairman of the People's Party. In California's 1982 Democratic primary for U.S. Senate, he polled a half-million votes, and came in second in a field of nine.
In 1948 Vidal wrote the highly praised international best-seller The City and the Pillar. This was followed by The Judgment of Paris and the prophetic Messiah. In the fifties Vidal wrote plays for live television and films for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. One of the television plays became the successful Broadway play Visit to a Small Planet (1957). Directly for the theater he wrote the prize-winning hit The Best Man (1960). In 1964 Vidal returned to the novel with Julian, the story of the apostate Roman emperor. This novel has been published in many languages and editions. As Henry de Montherlant wrote: 'Julian is the only book about a Roman emperor that I like to re-read. Vidal loves his protagonist; he knows the period thoroughly; and the book is a beautiful hymn to the twilight of paganism." During the last quarter-century Vidal has been telling the history of the United States as experienced by one family and its connections in what Gabriel Garcia Marquez has called "Gore Vidal's magnificent series of historical novels or novelized histories." They are, in chronological order, Burr, Lincoln, 1876, Empire, Hollywood, and Washington, D.C.
During the same period, Vidal invented a series of satiric comedies -Myra Breckinridge, Myron, Kalki, Duluth. "Vidal's development. . . along that line from Myra Breckinridge to Duluth is crowned with success," wrote Italo Calvino in La Repubblica (Rome). "I consider Vidal to be a master of that new form which is taking shape in world literature and which we may call the hyper-novel or the novel elevated to the square or to the cube." To this list Vidal added the highly praised - and controversial - Live from Golgotha in 1992. Palimpsest, Vidal's highly acclaimed memoir, was published in 1995 and was followed by a novel, The Smithsonian Institution, in 1998.
Vidal has also published several volumes of essays. When the National Book Critics Circle presented him with an award (1982), the citation read: "The American tradition of independent and curious learning is kept alive in the wit and great expressiveness of Gore Vidal's criticism." In 1993, he won the National Book Award for United States: Essays 1952-1992. His most recent collection, Virgin Islands, was published in Abacus in 1998.
Vidal co-starred with Tim Robbins in the movie Bob Roberts.
