''Washington, D.C.'' is a 1967 novel by

Gore Vidal Eugene Luther Gore Vidal ( ; born Eugene Louis Vidal, October 3, 1925 – July 31, 2012) was an American writer and public intellectual known for his acerbic epigrammatic wit. His novels and essays interrogated the Social norm, social and sexual ...

. The sixth novel in his '' Narratives of Empire'' series of

historical novel Historical fiction is a literary genre in which a fictional plot takes place in the setting of particular real historical events. Although the term is commonly used as a synonym for historical fiction literature, it can also be applied to oth ...

s (although the first one published), it begins in 1937 and continues into the

Cold War The Cold War was a period of global Geopolitics, geopolitical rivalry between the United States (US) and the Soviet Union (USSR) and their respective allies, the capitalist Western Bloc and communist Eastern Bloc, which lasted from 1947 unt ...

, tracing the families of Senator James Burden Day and influential newspaper publisher Blaise Sanford. This book is the least historical and most novelistic of any of the seven books. The seventh book in the series, ''The Golden Age'', takes place during nearly the same span of years with many of the same characters and needed to be written around the events of ''Washington, D.C.'' The novel is written in the third person and is inspired by the novels of

Henry James Henry James ( – ) was an American-British author. He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the ...

References

Novels set in the 1930s Novels set during the Cold War Novels by Gore Vidal Little, Brown and Company books American historical novels Third-person narrative novels Novels set in Washington, D.C. {{ColdWar-novel-stub