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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 20 minutes are free, is about Gore Vidal’s revisionist historical novel of the American founding, Burr. Aesthetically, we consider Vidal as icon and iconoclastic literary dissident, his alienation from the Romantic aesthetics of the traditional American novel, the limits of historical fiction as a genre, and Burr’s status as a neo-18th-century novel. Politically, we discuss Vidal’s ambivalence about the United States as a polity, his debunking presentation of historical figures like Washington, Hamilton, and Jefferson, and his ambiguous relation to questions of democracy, immigration, class, and the state. Finally and philosophically, we link Burr, for all that it is ostensibly a middlebrow historical novel, to the sexual antinomianism or queer nihilism of Vidal’s more vanguardist fictional efforts like The City and the Pillar and Myra Breckinridge. Please also like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall: