Creation

A sweeping novel of politics, war, philosophy, and adventurein a restored edition, featuring never-before-published material from Gore Vidal's original manuscriptCreationoffers a captivating grand tour of the ancient world. Cyrus Spitama, grandson of the prophet Zoroaster and lifelong friend of Xerxes, spent most of his life as Persian ambassador for the great king Darius. He traveled to India, where he discussed nirvana with Buddha, and to the warring states of Cathay, where he learned of Tao from Master Li and fished on the riverbank with Confucius. Now blind and aged in Athensthe Athens of Pericles, Sophocles, Thucydides, Herodotus, and SocratesCyrus recounts his days as he strives to resolve the fundamental questions that have guided his life's journeys: how the universe was created, and why evil was created with good. In revisiting the fifth century b.c.one of the most spectacular periods in historyGore Vidal illuminates the ideas that have shaped civilizations for millennia.

Gore Vidal was born in 1925 at the United States Military Academy at West Point. His first novel, <i>Williwaw</i>, written when he was nineteen years old and serving in the Army, appeared in the spring of 1946. Since then he has written twenty-three novels, five plays, many screenplays, short stories, well over two hundred essays, and a memoir.