Inventing a Nation is Gore Vidal's testament to the America he loves and mourns, to its continued promise and troubled future. Vidal, a master stylist of American literature and one of the most acute observers of American life and history, turns his immense literary and historiographic talent to a portrait of the first three presidents of the United States, George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. Vidal's splendid and percipient prose animates key moments of decision in the birth of the American nation, and we come to know these men in new ways-their opinions of each other and the wider world, and their concerns about creating a viable democracy. Vidal brings America's founding fathers to life and illuminates the force and weight of the documents they wrote, the speeches they gave, and the institutions of government they fashioned. As one of Australia's leading politicians, Bob Carr, writes in the Introduction to this special Australian edition: 'In these