SOURCE: “Ecce Homo,” in The New Republic, October 5, 1992, pp. 36-7.

In the following review, Kazin offers unfavorable assessments of Live from Golgotha and The Decline and Fall of the American Empire. While conceding small “pleasure” in reading Screening History, Kazin objects to Vidal's view of history and his abrasive tone.

“American life for the writer is so desperate that it has driven Gore Vidal to live abroad.”

—Erica Jong, The New York Observer, June 29, 1990

One night in Rome, in 1975, the Italian journalist Luigi Barzini told me that Gore Vidal was thinking of becoming an Italian citizen and had sought his advice on the matter. Barzini was beside himself with scorn, but I was impressed. Until then I had not seen Vidal as the exasperated radical that he claimed to be; he seemed to be playing the part of a weary patrician at Hollywood dinner tables, where it was...