“At the time he begins writing Burr, he’s on the top of his game,” says Jay Parini author of the 2015 Vidal biography, Empire of Self. That was the year after the debates which, along with the publication of his scandalous sex satire, Myra Breckenridge, had helped propel the then 43-year-old to national prominence. Vidal began writing about Burr in late 1969. (2015’s documentary Best of Enemies highlights these vituperative but entertaining televised fights between two heavyweight intellectuals of the left and right.) His sharp wit and on-camera poise was best displayed in his debates with luminaries like conservative ideologue William F.

He once said, ‘There is not one human problem that could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.’” “Though he lost both times,” noted the Times’ Charles McGrath, “he often conducted himself as a sort of unelected shadow president. The aristocratic Vidal also dabbled in politics: He ran for Congress from New York in 1960, and for the Senate in California in 1982. In his obituary, the New York Times called Vidal a “prolific, elegant, all-around man of letters.” He was also a successful television writer in the medium’s early days, and a regular on the talk show circuit later in his career (Reportedly, Johnny Carson was impressed enough to offer him a spot as a regular guest host of “The Tonight Show”). More than 40 years before there was Hamilton, there was Burr, the best-selling and critically acclaimed 1973 novel about the disgraced Founding Father-written by a celebrity author with a reputation as a skilled duelist himself (albeit with words, not pistols). In the case of Aaron Burr-the “damn fool” who shot Alexander Hamilton-the answer to that last question, at least before playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda came around, was simple: Gore Vidal. “Who lives? Who dies? Who tells your story?” sing the cast of Hamilton in the finale of the smash Broadway musical.

Messias by Gore Vidal