Gore Vidal Biography and List of Works

Prolific American novelist, playwright, and essayist, one of the great stylists of contemporary American prose, and an active figure in politics. Vidal made his debut as novelist with WILLIWAW at the age of 19, while still in US Army uniform.

"One understands of course why the role of the individual in history is instinctively played down by a would-be egalitarian society. We are, quite naturally, afraid of being victimized by reckless adventurers. To avoid this we have created a myth of the ineluctable mass ('other-directedness'), which governs all. Science, we are told, is not a matter of individual inquiry but of collective effort. Even the surface storminess of our elections disguises a fundamental indifference to human personality; if not this man, then that one; it's all the same, life will go on."
(from 'Robert Graves and the Twelve Caesars', in Rocking the Boat, 1963)

Gore Vidal grew accustomed at an early age to a life among political and social notables. He was born at the military academy in West Point, New York, where his father was an instructor. He was raised near Washington, DC, in the house of his grandfather, Thomas P. Gore, a populist Democrat senator from Oklahoma. Vidal learned about political life from him and as a teenager he adopted the first name of Gore. Vidal also spent time on the Virginia estate of his stepfather, Hugh. D. Auchincloss. After graduating from Philips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, he served on an army supply ship in the Aleutian Islands, near Alaska. Much of his time in the Enlisted Reserve Corps was devoted to writing. Upon his discharge he worked for six months for the publishing firm of E.P. Dutton. From 1947 to 1949 Vidal lived in Antigua, Guatemala. His first novel, Williwaw, is based on his wartime experiences as first mate on Freight Ship 35 in the Alaskan Harbour Craft Detachment. The conventional seafaring story was written in the spirit Ernest Hemingway.

The novel was praised by the critics, as were his following books, although THE CITY AND THE PILLAR (1948) shocked the public with its homosexual main character. Despite these reservations Vidal became known as a serious writer at the age of 21, and the novel 'broke the mould' of gay American fiction. The book was reissued in 1965 with a different ending. THE JUDGEMENT OF PARIS (1953) centres on a young man travelling with the jet set and wondering how to satisfy his own part-cynical, part-romantic outlook. Several of his following novels failed to gain critical approval and Vidal started to write plays for television, motion pictures and the stage. Among his best-known works from the 1950s is VISIT TO A SMALL PLANET (produced for television in 1955).

In the 1960s Vidal returned to the literary scene by producing historical or contemporary novels, including JULIAN (1964), written in the form of a journal by the eponymous Roman emperor, WASHINGTON, D.C. (1967), a political thriller spanning the years 1937-52, BURR (1974), in which the title character rises above the other Founding Fathers, 1876 (1976), DULUTH (1983), and LINCOLN (1984), a carefully reconstructed account of the life of the US president. Vidal views Lincoln as a tyrannical character that is "almost diabolically unknowable in his use of power". CREATION (1981) is the memoir of an imaginary grandson of Zoroaster who travels the world in the service of the Persian kings and toys with the ideas of Confucius, Gautama Buddha, Anaxagoras and other thinkers. In LIVE FROM GOLGOTHA (1992) Vidal portrays events in the Bible as though they are being reported on television. Among Vidal's finest works are two novels that deal with power and sex: MYRA BRECKENRIDGE (1968) is a transsexual comedy parodying the cult of the Hollywood film star, dedicated to Christopher Isherwood. Its sequel, MYRON, appeared in 1974. Myra is a feminist and her alternate self, Myron, is her mirror image and bitter antagonist.

The hero of Washington, D.C., Peter Sandford, appears again in THE GOLDEN AGE (2000), in which the reader meets a number of real, historical personages, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Joseph Alsop, Tennessee Williams, and the author himself. '"Vidal's big sprawling novel about America's transformation during and after World War II coats its ethical inquiries with plenty of narrative sweeteners: the sweep of history, celebrity walk-ons, conspiracy theories and reams of conversation, much of it witty, some lumbering. But the issue of power and who should hold it is never far form the surface. Sanford confronts the scheming and ambitious Congressman Clay Overbury, who also appeared in Washington, D.C., and asks, "Why must you be President?" To Overbury, the answer is obvious: "Some people are meant to be. Some are not. Obviously you're not."' (Curtis Ellis in Time, Nov. 6, 2000)

As the grandson of the politician, T.P. Gore Vidal has been an active figure in liberal politics. In 1960 he ran unsuccessfully for the US Congress as a Democratic-Liberal candidate in New York. Between 1970 and 1972 he was co-chairman of the left-leaning People's Party. In 1982 Vidal launched a campaign in California for the US senate. He came second out of a field of nine, polling half a million votes.

"Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies."

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s Vidal lived in Italy and appeared as himself in Fellini's Roma (1972). Vidal's house in Ravello, La Rondinaia, is perched 60 m above the Amalfi coast. During the Reagan years, Vidal published a collection of essays, ARMAGEDDON (1987), in which he explores his love-hate relationship with contemporary America. In 1994 Vidal co-starred with Tim Robbins in the film Bob Roberts. His collected essays, UNITED STATES (1993), won a National Book Award. It is a valuable introduction for those interested in American politics and literature. In PALIMPSEST (1995) Vidal wrote of his early life and friends, among them President Kennedy's family.

"Yet the myth that JFK was a philosopher-king will continue as long as the Kennedy's remain in politics. And much of the power they exert over the national imagination is a direct result of the ghastliness of what happened at Dallas. But though the world's grief and shock were genuine, they were not entirely for JFK himself. The death of a young leader necessarily strikes an atavistic chord. For thousands of years the man-god was sacrificed to ensure with blood the harvest, and there is always an element of ecstasy as well as awe in our collective guilt."
(Vidal in 'The Holy Family', from Collected Essays, 1974)

As an essayist Vidal has dealt with a wide range of subjects from literature to issues of national interest, and people he has known. Vidal's family provided him with a wealth of material, starting with his maternal grandfather, former senator Thomas Pryor Gore and his relation to Jackie Kennedy through one of his mother's marriages. Vidal has also met and worked with prominent figures, freely using these connections in his essays. Readers learn the habits of such personages as John F. Kennedy - 'not much interested in giving pleasure to his partner - Henry James, Tennessee Williams, Anaïs Nin, and many others. He once described Ronald Reagan as "a triumph of the embalmer's art." Often Vidal has been pointedly controversial, for instance his support for the legalization of illegal drugs - it would remove the Mafia from the drug market. "It is possible to stop most drug addiction in the United States within a very short time. Simply make all drugs available and sell them at cost. Label each drug with a precise description of what effect-good or bad-the drug will have on the taker." (The New York Times, 1970; from The Last Empire, 2001) In the spring of 2001 in Prague Vidal attacked his home country's bureaucracy, health care, and educational system so fiercely that Václav Klaus, Chairman of the Czech Parliament, considered it improper. In The Nation Vidal suggests that the white race of Europe, Russia, Canada, and the United States should form a defensive alliance against "more than one billion grimly efficient Asiatics" (see The Last Empire, 2001).

For further reading: Gore Vidal by Fred Kaplan (2000); Gore Vidal: A Critical Companion by Susan Baker (1997); Gore Vidal by Robert F. Kiernan (1982); Gore Vidal, or, A Vision from a Particular Position by Stephen Macaulay (1982); Views from a Window by R.J. Stanton (1980); The Apostate Angel by Bernard F. Dick (1974); Gore Vidal by R.L. White (1968 - Trivia: Vidal's attack on sexual norms have brought him into conflict with such macho writers as Norman Mailer. - According to some sources Vidal has always wanted to be the President of the United States. - James A. Michener on Vidal: "Gore Vidal, who wrote Williwaw at only nineteen, was another whose early book could well have been his last, but instead he wrote a series of books that varied in subject matter from the critical days of early Christianity to the dramatic eras of American history to outrageous sexual games. I envy him two novels on whose subjects I also did a great deal of work: Julian, which deals with the apostate who tried to turn back Christianity in ancient Antiochea, and 1876, which covers the amazing incident in American history that year when the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes stole the presidential election from the Democrat Samuel J.Tilden. Vidal knows how to make the most of his material, whatever the source, and I would have been proud to have written either these books I've cited." (from The World is My Home, 1992) - Gore Vidal's film scripts & detective novels: Tennessee Williams: Suddenly Last Summer (1958 - film 1959, dir. by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, script Gore Vidal - Is Paris Burning? - film 1965, dir. by René Clément, written by Francis Ford Coppola and Gore Vidal, based on the international bestseller Paris, brûle-t-il? by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre - In the 1950s Vidal published three detective novels under the name of Edgar Box, unfortunately these novels did not gain any kind of success, either from critics or readers. - Death in the Fifth Position (1952); Death Before Bedtime ( 1953); Death Likes It Hot (1954)

Williwaw, (1946)