Burr

Old and out of favor, Aaron Burr sets down his own account of a life that began in the fighting of the Revolutionary War and ended in the courtroom of his treason trial. Vidal presents the story as Burr's memoir, with the aging man speaking in his own voice to a young listener who takes down his recollections. Burr's rise and fall are tangled with the ambitions of the men who founded the young republic, including his long rivalry with Alexander Hamilton. The novel is the first book in Vidal's Narratives of Empire series, a sequence of historical novels that examine America's past through figures often left out of the official record.