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The Last Empire (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)

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Gore Vidal, as his volume of collected essays The Last Empire demonstrates, is a classic example of the man of letters, someone who is both a creator of literature and a critic, from a radical perspective, of literature and society. In Vidal’s case the radical perspective comes from the southern populism imbibed from his grandfather.

Populism was a movement among Southern and Western farmers in the late nineteenth century. As historian Richard Hofstadter pointed out in The Age of Reform (1955), populists looked back to what they believed was a “golden age”...

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