Jay Parini intended this collection of critical essays to be a Festschrift for Vidal’s sixty-fifth birthday in 1990. Its lateness may suggest he found some difficulty in obtaining suitable material, and account for the mixed quality of the essays. There is, however, so little available about Vidal that we must be grateful for this collection, which contains previously unpublished material and reprints some essays which would otherwise be difficult to trace.

Vidal has been writing for nearly fifty years, and his output has been remarkable, both for quantity and content. His general neglect by academia and the refusal of critics to judge him by his own standards, but rather by their own prejudices and preconceptions, results largely from his espousal of causes before their time, and his refusal to belong to ‘schools’ of writing, a trait which has led academics and critics alike to brand him as ‘old-fashioned’.