The book is never narrated from Lincoln’s perspective. In the series, Vidal offers works of historical fiction that reinterpret American history starting from the American Revolution and spanning past World War II. The novel is part of Gore Vidal’s ‘Narratives of Empire’ series and joins his other works Burr (1973), 1876 (1976) and Washington D.C. He draws from contemporary diaries, memoirs, letters, newspaper accounts, the biographical writings of John Hay and John Nicolay (Lincoln's secretaries), and the work of modern historians. Though Lincoln is the focus, the book is never narrated from his point of view (with the exception of several paragraphs describing a dream Lincoln had shortly before his death) Vidal instead writes from the perspective of key historical figures.

Rather than focus on the Civil War itself, the novel is centred on Lincoln's political and personal struggles. The novel describes the presidency of Abraham Lincoln and extends from the start of the American Civil War until his assassination.

Lincoln's loving but mentally decomposing wife, his view from the White House on slavery and America's bloodiest war, and his own, fierce personal ambition: all are portrayed with a vibrancy and an urgency that almost belies what they have now become ? history itself.Lincoln: A Novel is a 1984 historical novel, part of the Narratives of Empire series by Gore Vidal. Yet gradually Lincoln the towering leader of deep vision emerges in a Washington engulfed by fear, greed and the horrors of the Civil War. People in this novel are not averse to turning up, getting drunk, and regaling the reader with details of Lincoln's whoring activities and his seemingly inexhaustible supply of folksy stories. Observed alternately by his loved ones, his rivals and his future assassins, Lincoln at first appears as an inept and naive backwoods lawyer. Yet in this brilliantly realised study of Abraham Lincoln, he paints a surprising and near-heroic picture of the man who led America through four of the most divisive and dangerous years of the nation's history. In the hazardous fictional terrain of his historical novels, Gore Vidal is never especially kind to American history in general, or to its icons in particular.

Lincoln by gore vidal