Gore Vidal wears outrage the way Tom Wolfe wears white suits. It's his signature. He's written 25 novels, two memoirs, scores of film and television scripts and a dozen books of essays, including his new release The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal (Doubleday, $27.95), yet still finds time to be cantankerous.

Vidal, who appears Thursday at Miami Book Fair International, has reason. Last month he took a tumble and fractured his spine, not recommended when you're 83. What makes him cranky, though, is the tumble taken by the country he calls the United States of Amnesia.

``We have a political system which has been so crooked so long there's no rationalizing it. Everything is a lie and a cheat, and everybody is grabbing as much money as they can.''

Speaking from his home in Los Angeles, Vidal is supposed to be convalescing before his book fair appearance, but he's not going to take this lying down.

As recently as May, he predicted the country was heading for a crash. ``I was quite right, wasn't I? With the course we were set on, it was going to happen. You don't have to work for Goldman Sachs to think these things through.''

Vidal is healing, and he only hopes America proves to be as resilient. It's not the only time man and nation have been so integrally intertwined. ''I have lived through nearly one third of the history of the United States, which proves not how old I am but how young the republic is,'' he wrote in 1988.

That essay, The National Security State, is one of 21 works in Selected Essays, which Vidal's editor, Jay Parini, calls ''his greatest hits,'' a rich sampling of Vidal's take on everything from Tarzan to his favorite subject -- America.

Eugene Luther Vidal Jr. grew up steeped in America, its past and its promise. ''My grandfather, Senator Gore, whom I loved, told me a lot of good stories, stories about war, about early days of Oklahoma, the land rush.'' The Oklahoma senator told stories because he couldn't read them. He was blind. Vidal often read him the Congressional record, making a young Vidal better informed about the policies shaping our country than many of us are today.

Vidal ran for Congress in 1960 and for U.S. Senate in 1982. He lost both times. Though never elected as a senator, he played one impeccably in Tim Robbins' scathing political satire Bob Roberts. Well, it was scathing satire when it came out in 1991, but that was before the Bush years.

' `I'm a wartime president.' '' Vidal does a creditable Bush impersonation, then snorts. ``He's somebody playing at it. And we are the unfortunate fools who are played with. Nobody has mentioned that much of the bankruptcy was due to prosecuting two wars undeclared by the Congress, done just for theatrics to make a silly little president look like a real guy.''

Vidal is often trotted out as a political commentator, ''but he's a novelist, not a pundit,'' says Parini, Vidal's literary executor as well as his editor. ``Gore's a real literary man, deeply well read. He knows the literary traditions.''

THE SOFTER SIDE

For a notoriously crusty guy, Vidal is surprisingly tender when discussing literature -- good literature, as opposed to popular literature, which he defines as ''bad writing that is widely read.'' He calls the all-but-forgotten author Dawn Powell ''a great comic writer.'' He enthuses over Parini, whose prolific works include ''a marvelous biography of Robert Frost.'' When asked about other authors he likes, Vidal replies, ``If I want to read something boring, there's a lot out there.''

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