Gore Vidal’s nuanced, novelistic portrait of a president

Lincoln

By Gore Vidal

Vintage, 672 pages, $16 paper

Is fiction more authentic than history? This 1984 novel takes no liberties with the truth of the heroic, tragic Abraham Lincoln, but Gore Vidal renders the man in marble with such nuance that the era and all its characters come alive, and readers feel the urgency of those days.