Inventing a Nation

In this work of political history, Gore Vidal examines the revolutionary generation through George Washington, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, while also considering Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. Rather than treating the founders as a harmonious group of national sages, he presents men divided by temperament, region, class interest and conflicting ideas about executive power, finance, foreign policy and the future character of the republic.

The book moves from independence and constitution-making into the administrations of the first three presidents, showing how practices later regarded as settled traditions emerged from improvisation and partisan conflict. Vidal stresses the distance between republican language and the realities of slavery, property and elite government, while recognising the institutional durability of the system the founders created. The result is an argumentative, biographical account of how the United States was politically invented rather than a conventional celebratory narrative.