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Vidal favours this over narration or observational writing, attempting to convey his own personal wit and charisma through his characters.

Much of the writing is presented through dramatic, flamboyant dialogue. Significant characters include Lincoln’s cabinet secretaries William Seward, Salmon Chase as well as Kate Sprague, John Hay, Mary Todd Lincoln and David Herold. Rather, the reader views Lincoln through the eyes of his enemies, friends, political rivalries and even those who sought to kill him. The book is never narrated from Lincoln’s perspective. In the series, Vidal offers works of historical fiction that reinterpret American history starting from the American Revolution and spanning past World War II. The novel is part of Gore Vidal’s ‘Narratives of Empire’ series and joins his other works Burr (1973), 1876 (1976) and Washington D.C. He draws from contemporary diaries, memoirs, letters, newspaper accounts, the biographical writings of John Hay and John Nicolay (Lincoln's secretaries), and the work of modern historians. Though Lincoln is the focus, the book is never narrated from his point of view (with the exception of several paragraphs describing a dream Lincoln had shortly before his death) Vidal instead writes from the perspective of key historical figures. Rather than focus on the Civil War itself, the novel is centred on Lincoln's political and personal struggles. The novel describes the presidency of Abraham Lincoln and extends from the start of the American Civil War until his assassination. Vidal’s portrait of the president is at once intimate and monumental, stark and complex, drawn with the wit, grace, and authority of one of the great historical novelists.Lincoln: A Novel is a 1984 historical novel, part of the Narratives of Empire series by Gore Vidal. The cast of characters is almost Dickensian: politicians, generals, White House aides, newspapermen, Northern and Southern conspirators, amiably evil bankers, and a wife slowly going mad. In this profoundly moving novel, a work of epic proportions and intense human sympathy, Lincoln is observed by his loved ones and his rivals. Isolated in a ramshackle White House in the center of a proslavery city, Lincoln presides over a fragmenting government as Lee’s armies beat at the gates.

During the next four years there will be numerous plots to murder this man who has sworn to unite a disintegrating nation. The future president is in disguise, for there is talk of a plot to murder him. It opens early on a frozen winter morning in 1861, when President-elect Abraham Lincoln slips into Washington, flanked by two bodyguards. Lincoln is the cornerstone of Gore Vidal’s fictional American chronicle, which includes Burr, 1876, Washington, D.C., Empire, and Hollywood.