From the age of Eisenhower to the dawning of the Clinton era, Gore Vidal's United States offers an incomparably rich tapestry of American intellectual and political life in a tumultuous period. It also provides the best, most sustained exposure possible to the most wide-ranging, acute, and original literary intelligence of the post—World War II years. United States is an essential book in the canon of twentieth-century American literature and an endlessly fascinating work.