Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal is the author of twenty-four novels, five plays, two memoirs, numerous screenplays, television dramas, short stories, pamphlets, and more than 200 essays. His career has spanned eight decades, beginning in the years immediately following World War II and continuing with the recent publication of his Selected Essays (2008).

Vidal was born in 1925 with high political and social connections. His father, Eugene Luther Vidal, worked for the Roosevelt administration as Director of Air Commerce. His maternal grandfather was Senator Thomas Prior Gore of Oklahoma, a Democrat who played an important role in Democratic politics for many decades. Gore Vidal's mother, Nina Gore Vidal, was divorced in 1935, when Vidal was ten. She then married Hugh D. Auchincloss, a wealthy financier, who in turn divorced her and married Jacqueline Kennedy's mother, thus establishing a connection between Vidal and the Kennedy clan that persisted through the presidency of John F. Kennedy. In 1943, after graduating from Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, Vidal entered the U.S. Army Reserve Corps. During this service, he wrote his first novel, Williwaw (1946). He published eight novels in succession between 1946 and 1954, including The City and the Pillar (1948), The Judgement of Paris (1952), and Messiah (1954).

The City and The Pillar was one of the first explicitly gay novels written by an American, earning both scorn and praise. Vidal's next five novels were dismissed by the mainstream press and few were sold. To support himself, Vidal published three mystery novels under the psuedonym Edgar Box, Death in the Fifth Position (1952), Death Before Bedtime (1953), and Death Likes it Hot (1954). During the 1950s, he produced dozens of television scripts, including Visit to a Small Planet, later adapted into a Broadway play. Vidal's screewnwriting credits include The Catered Affair, I Accuse!, Ben Hur, and Suddenly, Last Summer. He also acted in several films, including Bob Roberts.

In 1960, Vidal ran for Congress as a Democrat-Liberal in New York's 29th District. In his public speeches, he supported many controversial ideas, including the recognition of Red China, shrinking the Pentagon's budget, and putting more federal money into education. He was defeated, though he won more votes in his district than John F. Kennedy, who headed the Democratic ticket. In the 1960s, Vidal became a leading writer for the newly established The New York Review of Books, in whose pages he would address a wide range of cultural and political topics. Vidal was a leading spokesman for the New Left, an iconoclast who debated William F. Buckley on television and wrote scathing essays about Richard Nixon. In 1982, he ran in the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate in California; to the surprise of many, he finished second in a crowded field behind Jerry Brown, a well-known political figure in the state.

Many consider Vidal's exploration of American history in such novels as Washington, D.C. (1967), 1876 (1976), Lincoln, and The Golden Age (2000) as his principal achievement. Writing in The New York Review of Books, the critic Harold Bloom characterizes Vidal as "a masterly American historical novelist, now wholly matured, who has found his truest subject, which is our national political history during precisely those years when our political and military histories were as one, one thing and one thing only: the unwavering will of Abraham Lincoln to keep the states united." Bloom concludes: "Lincoln, together with the curiously assorted trio of Julian, Myra Breckinridge, and Burr, demonstrates that his narrative achievement is vastly underestimated by American academic criticism, an injustice he has repaid amply in his essayist attacks upon the academy, and in the sordid intensities of Duluth."

In 1993, Vidal won the National Book Award for United States: Essays, 1952-1992.

Biography adapted from Jay Parini.

Bibliography:

The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal (2008)

Point to Point Navigation : A Memoir (2006)

Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia (2004)

Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson (2003)

Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta (2002)

The Golden Age (2000)

Sexually Speaking: Collected Sex Writings (1999)

The American Presidency (1998)

Live from Golgotha (1992)

Hollywood (1989)

Empire (1987)

Lincoln (1984)

Duluth (1983)

1876 (1976)

Burr (1973)

Myra Breckenridge (1968)

Washington, D.C. (1967)

Julian (1964)

Rocking the Boat (1962)

Messiah (1956)

Death Likes it Hot (as Edgar Box) (1955)

Death Before Bedtime (as Edgar Box) (1953)

Death in the Fifth Position (as Edgar Box) (1952)

A Search for the King (1950)

A Star's Progress (as Katherine Everard) (1950)

The Season of Comfort (1949)

The City and the Pillar (1948)

In a Yellow Wood (1947)

Williwaw (1946)

Links:

The Nation interview
Salon interview
PBS's American Masters page for Vidal
Archive of articles from The New York Review of Books
Archive of articles in The New York Times
Salon.com review of 'Selected Essays'