The American People, Volume 1

A satirical, radical reimagining of US history from John Wilkes Booth to Joseph McCarthy, by the renowned playwright and author. "A slashing chronicle of American bigotry and hate from the country's beginnings. . . . As a work of sustained passion, it is formidable." — The New York Times Forty years in the making, The American People sets forth Larry Kramer's vision of his homeland. As the founder of ACT UP and the author of Faggots and The Normal Heart, Kramer has decisively affected American lives and letters. Here he reimagines our history. This is the story of one nation under a plague, contaminated by greed, hate, and diseases and host to transcendent acts of courage and kindness. In this first volume, which runs up to the 1950s, we meet prehistoric monkeys who spread a peculiar virus, a Native American shaman whose sexual explorations mutate into occult visions, and early English settlers who establish loving same-sex couples only to fall prey to the forces of bigotry. George Washington and Alexander Hamilton revel in unexpected intimacies, and John Wilkes Booth's motives for assassinating Abraham Lincoln are thoroughly revised. In the twentieth century, the nightmare of history deepens as a religious sect conspires with eugenicists, McCarthyites, and Ivy Leaguers to exterminate homosexuals and the AIDS virus begins to spread. Against all this, Kramer sets the intimate heartfelt story of a middle-class family outside Washington, D.C., trying to cope with the darkest of times. The American People is a work of ribald satire, prophetic anger, and dazzling imagination. It is an encyclopedic indictment written with outrageous love. "Brilliant. . . . A protracted display of pyrotechnic virtuosity. No American sacred cow is left untipped." — The Washington Post "Wildly inventive. . . . [A] formidable and admirable literary experiment. . . . Grotesque and macabre in ways that so many somewhat antiseptic works of conventional American fiction these days won't dare." — Pittsburgh Post-Gazette " The American People is likely to find its place among the notable works of the Western canon." — The Gay & Lesbian Review