Early fiction : From The City and the Pillar ; "The ladies in the library" ; From the Judgment of Paris -- Theater writings : The best man -- Inventions : Myra Breckinridge ; From Duluth -- Religion : From Julian ; From Creation ; From Live from Golgotha -- Chronicles of American History : From Burr ; From Lincoln ; From 1876 ; From Empire ; From Hollywood ; From Washington, D.C. -- Essays : At home in Washington, D.C. ; On flying ; West Point ; The twelve Caesars ; The birds and the bees ; Women's liberation : feminism and its discontents ; Pink triangle and yellow star ; Drugs ; The day the American Empire ran out of gas ; Bad history ; President and Mrs. U.S. Grant ; Theodore Roosevelt : an American sissy ; Eleanor Roosevelt ; The holy family ; Ronnie and Nancy : a life in pictures ; Remembering Orson Welles ; Who makes the movies? ; French letters : theories of the new novel ; Edmund Wilson : this critic and this gin and these shoes ; Montaigne ; Thomas Love Peacock : the novel of ideas ; The bookchat of Henry James ; William Dean Howells ; Calvino's death ; Some memories of the glorious bird and an earlier self