Times. In 1982 Vidal won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism for his collection of essays, The Second American Revolution. A propos Duluth (1983), Italo Calvino wrote (La Repubblica, Rome): “Vidal’s development… along that line from Myra Breckinridge to Duluth is crowned with great success, not only for the density of comic effects, each one filled with meaning, not only for the craftsmanship in construction, put together like a clock-work which fears no word processor, but because this latest book holds its own built-in theory, that which the author calls his ‘apres-poststructuralism.’ I consider Vidal to be a master of that new form which is taking shape in world literature and which we may call the hyper-novel or the novel elevated to the square or to the cube.”
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