Brilliantly realized, enormously readable, Gore Vidal's #1 best seller paints a fascinating portrait of Aaron Burr, who lived out his long life partly as a suspected traitor and partly as one of the most heroic and colorful founding fathers. Though the memoir itself and the young journalist are fictional, the facts are actual. The portrait of the major characters -- Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, the Madisons, Jackson, Van Buren -- are drawn from their own words and from the observations of their contemporaries. The result is the rarest of books -- a powerfully readable historical novel which at the same time recreates with scrupulous accuracy and the originality of a major historical imagination the most significant years in the history of America.