Gore Vidal and Lincoln's legacy

[LincolnMan]

Found this comment by Gore Vidal regarding Lincoln as a "writer" in The Last Note on Lincoln from The New York Review of Books, August 15, 1991:

In any event, for better or worse, we still live in the house divided that Lincoln cobbled together, and it is always useful to get to know through his writing not the god of the establishment-priests but a literary genius who was called upon to live, rather than merely to write, a high tragedy. I can think of no one in literary or political history quite like this essential American writer.