Gore Vidal

Eugene Luther Gore Vidal ( vih-DAHL; born Eugene Louis Vidal, October 3, 1925 – July 31, 2012) was an American writer and public intellectual known for his cynical epigrammatic wit. His novels and essays criticized the social and sexual norms he perceived as driving American life. Vidal was heavily involved in politics, and unsuccessfully sought office twice as a Democratic Party candidate, first in 1960 to the United States House of Representatives (for New York), and later in 1982 to the United States Senate (for California).

A grandson of U.S. Senator Thomas Gore, Vidal was born into an upper-class political family. His political and cultural essays were published in The Nation, the New Statesman, the New York Review of Books, and Esquire magazines. As a public intellectual, Vidal's topical debates on sex, politics, and religion with other intellectuals and writers occasionally turned into quarrels with the likes of William F. Buckley Jr. and Norman Mailer.

As a novelist, Vidal explored the nature of corruption in public and private life. His style of narration evoked the time and place of his stories and delineated his characters' psychology. His third novel, The City and the Pillar (1948), about a dispassionately presented male homosexual relationship, offended conservative book reviewers' literary, political, and moral sensibilities.

Vidal's historical novel Julian (1964) recreates the world of Julian the Apostate (r. AD 361–363), the Roman emperor who attempted to reestablish Roman polytheism to counter Christianity. Myra Breckinridge (1968) is a social satire that explores the mutability of gender roles and sexual orientation as social constructs established by social mores. In Burr (1973) and Lincoln (1984), both part of his Narratives of Empire series of novels, each protagonist is presented as "A Man of the People" and as "A Man" in a narrative exploration of how the public and private facets of personality affect U.S. politics.

Vidal was born in the cadet hospital of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, the only child of Eugene Luther Vidal (1895–1969) and Nina S. Gore (1903–1978). Vidal was born there because his father, a U.S. Army officer, was then serving as the first aeronautics instructor at the military academy. The middle name, Louis, was a mistake on the part of his father, "who could not remember, for certain, whether his own name was Eugene Louis or Eugene Luther". In his memoir Palimpsest (1995), Vidal wrote, "My birth certificate says 'Eugene Louis Vidal': this was changed to Eugene Luther Vidal Jr.; then Gore was added at my christening in 1939; then, at fourteen, I got rid of the first two names."

Vidal was baptized in January 1939, when he was 13 years old, by the headmaster of St. Albans School, where Vidal attended preparatory school. The baptismal ceremony was effected so he "could be confirmed [into the Episcopal faith]" at the Washington Cathedral, in February 1939, as "Eugene Luther Gore Vidal". He later said that, although the surname "Gore" was added to his names at the time of the baptism, "I wasn't named for him [maternal grandfather Thomas Pryor Gore], although he had a great influence on my life." In 1941, Vidal dropped his two first names, because he "wanted a sharp, distinctive name, appropriate for an aspiring author, or a national political leader ... I wasn't going to write as 'Gene' since there was already one. I didn't want to use the 'Jr.'"

His father, Eugene Luther Vidal Sr., was director (1933–1937) of the Commerce Department's Bureau of Air Commerce during the Roosevelt Administration and the great love of the aviator Amelia Earhart. At the U.S. Military Academy, Vidal Sr. had been a quarterback, coach, and captain of the football team and an all-American basketball player. He competed in the 1920 Summer Olympics and the 1924 Summer Olympics (seventh in the decathlon, and coach of the U.S. pentathlon). In the 1920s and the 1930s, Vidal Sr. was a founder or executive of three airline companies: the Ludington Line (later Eastern Airlines), Transcontinental Air Transport (later Trans World Airlines), and Northeast Airlines.

Gore's great-grandfather Eugen Fidel Vidal was born in Feldkirch, Austria, of Romansh background, and came to the U.S. with Gore's Swiss great-grandmother, Emma Hartmann.

Vidal's mother, Nina Gore, was a socialite who made her Broadway theater debut as an extra actress in Sign of the Leopard, in 1928. In 1922, Nina married Eugene Luther Vidal Sr. They divorced in 1935. Nina Gore Vidal married two more times, to Hugh D. Auchincloss and to Robert Olds. She also had "a long off-and-on affair" with the actor Clark Gable. As Nina Gore Auchincloss, Vidal's mother was an alternate delegate to the 1940 Democratic National Convention.

Vidal described his literary style as "knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn." The cultural critic Harold Bloom wrote that Vidal believed his sexuality had denied him full recognition from the U.S. literary community. Bloom contended that Vidal's limited recognition was more because his "best fictions" were historical novels, a subgenre "no longer available for canonization".

Vidal's literary career began with the success of the military novel Williwaw, a men-at-war story derived from his Alaskan Harbor Detachment duty during World War II. His third novel, The City and the Pillar (1948), caused a moralistic furor over his dispassionate presentation of a young protagonist coming to terms with his homosexuality. The novel was dedicated to "J. T."; decades later, Vidal confirmed that the initials were those of his boyhood friend and St. Albans classmate James Trimble III, who was killed in the Battle of Iwo Jima on March 1, 1945, and was the only person Vidal ever loved. Critics railed against Vidal's presentation of homosexuality in the novel, as it was viewed generally at the time as unnatural and immoral. Vidal said that New York Times critic Orville Prescott was so offended by the book that he refused to review or to permit other critics to review any book by Vidal. Vidal said that, upon the book's publication, an editor at E. P. Dutton told him, "You will never be forgiven for this book. Twenty years from now, you will still be attacked for it." Today, Vidal is often seen as an early champion of sexual liberation.

Under the pseudonym "Edgar Box", Vidal wrote the mystery novels Death in the Fifth Position (1952), Death before Bedtime (1953), and Death Likes it Hot (1954), featuring Peter Cutler Sargeant II, a publicist turned private eye. His satirical novel Messiah, detailing the rise of a new nontheistic religion that comes to largely replace the Abrahamic faiths, was also published in 1954. The Edgar Box genre novels sold well and earned the blacklisted Vidal a secret living. That success led Vidal to write in other genres, including the stage play The Best Man: A Play about Politics (1960) and the television play Visit to a Small Planet (1957). Two early teleplays were A Sense of Justice (1955) and Honor. He also wrote the pulp novel Thieves Fall Out under the pseudonym Cameron Kay but refused to have it reprinted under his real name.

In the 1960s, Vidal published Julian (1964), about the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate (r. A.D. 361–363), who sought to reinstate polytheistic paganism when he saw Christianity as a threat to the cultural integrity of the Roman Empire; Washington, D.C. (1967), about political life during Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency (1933–1945); and Myra Breckinridge (1968), a satire of the American movie business by way of a school of dramatic arts owned by a transsexual woman, the eponymous anti-heroine.

After publishing the plays Weekend (1968) and An Evening With Richard Nixon (1972) and the novel Two Sisters: A Novel in the Form of a Memoir (1970), Vidal concentrated on essays and developed two types of fiction. The first is about American history, novels specifically about the nature of national politics. The New York Times, quoting critic Harold Bloom about those historical novels, said that "Vidal's imagination of American politics is so powerful as to compel awe." The historical novels formed the seven-book series Narratives of Empire: (i) Burr (1973), (ii) Lincoln (1984), (iii) 1876 (1976), (iv) Empire (1987), (v) Hollywood (1990), (vi) Washington, D.C. (1967), and (vii) The Golden Age (2000). Besides U.S. history, Vidal also explored and analyzed the history of the ancient world, specifically the Axial Age (800–200 B.C.), in the novel Creation (1981). It was published without four chapters that were part of the manuscript he submitted to the publisher; Vidal restored the chapters and republished Creation in 2002.

The second type of fiction is the topical satire, such as Myron (1974), the sequel to Myra Breckinridge; Kalki (1978), about the end of the world and the consequent ennui; Duluth (1983), an alternate universe story; Live from Golgotha (1992), about the adventures of Timothy, Bishop of Ephesus, in the early days of Christianity; and The Smithsonian Institution (1998), a time-travel story.

In the U.S., Vidal is often considered an essayist rather than a novelist. Even the occasionally hostile literary critic, such as Martin Amis, wrote, "Essays are what he is good at ... [Vidal] is learned, funny, and exceptionally clear-sighted. Even his blind spots are illuminating." He often wrote literary critical essays on contemporary literature. In a 1976 overview of postmodern fiction published in The New York Review of Books, Vidal criticized what he called the "University Novel", contrasting novels written to be read with those "written to be taught." He partly blamed the rise of the "University Novel"—represented by the likes of Thomas Pynchon, William H. Gass, and others—on the French critic Roland Barthes. As the literary scholar Ben Libman has argued, Vidal associated Barthes with the Nouveau roman in France and, in the U.S., with Susan Sontag, to whose literary sensibilities he was opposed.

For six decades, Vidal applied himself to sociopolitical, sexual, historical, and literary subjects. In the essay anthology Armageddon (1987) he explored the intricacies of power (political and cultural) in the contemporary United States. His criticism of the incumbent president, Ronald Reagan, as a "triumph of the embalmer's art" communicated that Reagan's provincial worldview, and his administration's, was out of date and inadequate to the geopolitical realities of the late 20th century. In 1993, Vidal won the National Book Award for Nonfiction for the anthology United States: Essays 1952–92 (1993).

In 2000, Vidal published the collection of essays The Last Empire, then such self-described "pamphlets" as Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta and Imperial America, critiques of American expansionism, the military–industrial complex, the national security state and the George W. Bush administration. Vidal also wrote a historical essay about the Founding Fathers, Inventing a Nation. In 1995, he published a memoir, Palimpsest, and in 2006 its follow-up volume, Point to Point Navigation. Earlier that year, Vidal had published Clouds and Eclipses: The Collected Short Stories.

In 2009, Vidal won the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation, which called him a "prominent social critic on politics, history, literature and culture". The same year, the Man of Letters Gore Vidal was named honorary president of the American Humanist Association.

In 1956, MGM hired Vidal as a screenwriter with a four-year employment contract. In 1958, the director William Wyler required a script doctor to rewrite the screenplay for Ben-Hur (1959), originally written by Karl Tunberg. As one of several script doctors assigned to the project, Vidal rewrote significant portions of the script to resolve ambiguities of character motivation, specifically to clarify the enmity between the Jewish protagonist, Judah Ben-Hur, and the Roman antagonist, Messala, who had been close boyhood friends. In exchange for rewriting Ben-Hur, Vidal, on location in Italy, negotiated the early termination (at the two-year mark) of his MGM contract.

In the 1995 documentary film The Celluloid Closet, Vidal explained that Messala's failed attempt at resuming their homosexual, boyhood relationship motivated the ostensibly political enmity between Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston) and Messala (Stephen Boyd). Vidal said that Boyd was aware of the scene's homosexual subtext and that the director, the producer, and the screenwriter agreed to keep Heston ignorant of it, lest he refuse to play the scene. In turn, on learning of that explanation, Heston said that Vidal had contributed little to Ben-Hur. Despite Vidal's resolution of the character's motivations, the Screen Writers Guild assigned formal screenwriter credit to Karl Tunberg, in accordance with the WGA screenwriting credit system, which favored the "original author" of a screenplay rather than the writer of the filmed screenplay.

Two plays, The Best Man: A Play about Politics (1960, made into a film in 1964) and Visit to a Small Planet (1955), were theater and movie successes. Vidal occasionally returned to the movie business, and wrote historically accurate teleplays and screenplays about subjects important to him, such as Billy the Kid (1989), about William H. Bonney, a gunman in the New Mexico territory Lincoln County War and later an outlaw in the U.S. Western frontier, and 1979's Caligula (based upon the life of the Roman Emperor Caligula), from which Vidal had his screenwriter credit removed because the producer, Bob Guccione, the director, Tinto Brass, and the leading actor, Malcolm McDowell, added sex and violence to the script to increase its commercial appeal.

In the 1960s, Vidal migrated to Italy, where he befriended the film director Federico Fellini, for whom he appeared in a cameo role in the film Roma (1972). He also appeared in the American television series Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and in the films Bob Roberts (1992), a serio-comedy about a reactionary populist politician who manipulates youth culture to win votes; With Honors (1994), an Ivy league comedy-drama; Gattaca (1997), a science-fiction drama about genetic engineering; and Igby Goes Down (2002), a coming-of-age serio-comedy directed by his nephew Burr Steers.

Vidal began to drift toward the political left after he received his first paycheck and realized how much money the government took in tax. He reasoned that if the government was taking so much money, it should at least provide first-rate healthcare and education.

As a public intellectual, Vidal was identified with the liberal politicians and the progressive social causes of the old Democratic Party.

In 1960, Vidal was the Democratic nominee for Congress in the 29th Congressional District of New York, a usually Republican district that included most of the Catskills and the western bank of the Hudson River, including Newburgh. He lost to the Republican nominee, J. Ernest Wharton, 57% to 43%. Campaigning under the slogan You'll get more with Gore, Vidal received the most votes any Democratic candidate had received in the district in 50 years and outpolled John F. Kennedy (who lost the district with 38% of the vote). Among his supporters were Eleanor Roosevelt, Paul Newman, and Joanne Woodward, friends who spoke on his behalf.

In 1982, he campaigned against Jerry Brown, the incumbent governor of California, in the Democratic primary election for U.S. Senate. He placed second in the primary with 15% of the vote to Brown's 51%. Vidal accurately predicted that the Republican nominee, Pete Wilson, would win the election. His foray into senatorial politics is the subject of Gary Conklin's 1983 documentary film Gore Vidal: The Man Who Said No.

In a 2001 article, "The Meaning of Timothy McVeigh", Gore undertook to discover why domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh perpetrated the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. He concluded that McVeigh (a politically disillusioned U.S. Army veteran of the First Iraq War) had destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building as an act of revenge for the FBI's Waco massacre (1993) at the Branch Davidian Compound in Texas, believing that the U.S. government had mistreated Americans in the same manner that he believed the U.S. Army had mistreated the Iraqis. In the article, Vidal calls McVeigh an "unlikely sole mover" and theorizes that foreign/domestic conspiracies could have been involved.

In the American Conservative article "My Pen Pal Gore Vidal" (2012), Bill Kauffman wrote that Vidal's favorite American politician, during his lifetime, was Huey Long, the populist governor and senator from Louisiana, who also had perceived the essential, one-party nature of U.S. politics and who was assassinated by a lone gunman, Carl Weiss.

Despite that, Vidal said, "I think of myself as a conservative" with a proprietary attitude toward the United States. "My family helped start [this country] ... and we've been in political life ... since the 1690s, and I have a very possessive sense about this country". Based upon that background of populism, from 1970 to 1972 Vidal was a chairman of the People's Party of the United States. In 1971, he endorsed the consumer-rights advocate Ralph Nader for U.S. president in the 1972 election. In 2007, he endorsed Democrat Dennis Kucinich for president (in 2008), because Kucinich was "the most eloquent of the lot" of presidential candidates from either party and "very much a favorite out there, in the amber fields of grain".

In a 2009 interview with The Times of London, Vidal said there soon would be a dictatorship in the United States. The newspaper emphasized that Vidal, described as "the Grand Old Man of American belles-lettres", claimed that America was rotting away and to not expect Barack Obama to save the country and the nation from imperial decay. In this interview, Vidal also updated his views of his life, the U.S., and other political subjects. Vidal had earlier described what he saw as the political and cultural rot in the U.S. in his essay "The State of the Union" (1975):

There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party ... and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt—until recently ... and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.

In The Atlantic magazine interview "A Conversation with Gore Vidal" (October 2009), by John Meroney, Vidal spoke about topical and cultural matters of U.S. society. Asked his opinion about the arrest of the film director Roman Polanski in response to an extradition request by U.S. authorities for having fled the U.S. in 1978 to avoid jail for the statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl, Vidal said: "I really don't give a fuck. Look, am I going to sit and weep every time a young hooker feels as though she's been taken advantage of?"

Asked to elaborate, Vidal explained the cultural temper of the U.S. and of the Hollywood movie business in the 1970s:

The [news] media can't get anything straight. Plus, there's usually an anti-Semitic and anti-fag thing going on with the press—lots of crazy things. The idea that this girl was in her communion dress, a little angel, all in white, being raped by this awful Jew Polacko—that's what people were calling him—well, the story is totally different now from what it was then ... Anti-Semitism got poor Polanski. He was also a foreigner. He did not subscribe to American values, in the least. To [his persecutors], that seemed vicious and unnatural.

Asked to explain the term "American values", Vidal replied: "Lying and cheating. There's nothing better."

In response to Vidal's opinion about the Polanski case, a spokeswoman for the organization Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, Barbara Dorris, said, "People should express their outrage by refusing to buy any of his books", called Vidal a "mean-spirited buffoon", and said that, although "a boycott wouldn't hurt Vidal financially", it would "cause anyone else with such callous views to keep his mouth shut, and [so] avoid rubbing salt into the already deep wounds" of sexual abuse survivors.

In 1997, Vidal was one of 34 public intellectuals and celebrities who joined a publicity campaign waged by Scientologists against the German government, signing an open letter addressed to German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, published in the International Herald Tribune, alleging that Scientologists in Germany were treated "in the same way that the Nazi regime persecuted the Jews". Scientologists are free to operate in Germany, but the Church of Scientology is recognized not as a religious body but as a business with political goals and thus monitored by the German domestic intelligence service. Despite signing the letter, Vidal was critical of Scientology as a religion.

In her multi-volume memoir The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Anaïs Nin said she had had a love affair with Vidal, who denied it in his memoir Palimpsest (1995). In the 2013 article "Gore Vidal's Secret, Unpublished Love Letter to Anaïs Nin", writer Kim Krizan said she found an unpublished love letter from Vidal to Nin that contradicts his denial. Krizan said she found the letter while researching Mirages, the latest volume of Nin's uncensored diary, to which Krizan wrote the foreword.

Vidal cruised streets and bars in New York City and elsewhere and wrote in his memoir that by age 25 he had had more than 1,000 sexual encounters. He also said he had an intermittent romance with actress Diana Lynn and alluded to possibly having fathered a daughter. Vidal enjoyed telling friends about his sexual exploits. He claimed to have slept with Fred Astaire when he first moved to Hollywood and also with Dennis Hopper.

Vidal lived at various times in Italy and in the United States. In 1950, he bought the riverfront Edgewater estate in Barrytown, New York, at his friend Alice Astor Bouverie's recommendation. According to his memoir, he paid $16,000, with a $6,000 down payment and a $10,000 mortgage. In 1960, he was the Democratic nominee for the 29th Congressional District of New York State and used Edgewater as his campaign headquarters. He lost to the Republican nominee, J. Ernest Wharton, 57% to 43%. Among Vidal's supporters were Eleanor Roosevelt, Paul Newman, and Joanne Woodward, all of whom spoke on his behalf. While living at Edgewater he was a lecturer at nearby Bard College.

In November 1966, Vidal, then living in Italy, rented Edgewater to William vanden Heuvel, a lawyer, aide to Robert F. Kennedy, and husband of the writer Jean Stein. In 1969, Vidal sold Edgewater to New York financier Richard Jenrette for $125,000.

In 1972, Vidal purchased the Italian villa La Rondinaia ("The Swallow's Nest") in Ravello, on the Amalfi coast. He entertained notable guests at his home, including Andy Warhol, Mick Jagger, Paul Newman, Princess Margaret, and Johnny Carson. In 2003, as his health declined, Vidal sold La Rondinaia, and he and Austen returned to live at their villa in Outpost Estates, Los Angeles.

In 2010, Vidal began to suffer from Wernicke–Korsakoff syndrome. On July 31, 2012, he died of pneumonia at his home in the Hollywood Hills, aged 86. A memorial service was held for him at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre in New York City on August 23, 2012. He was buried next to Howard Austen in Rock Creek Cemetery, in Washington, D.C.

Vidal said he chose his gravesite because it is between the graves of two people who were important in his life: Henry Adams, the historian and writer, whose work Vidal admired; and his boyhood friend Jimmie Trimble, who was killed in World War II, a tragedy that haunted Vidal for the rest of his life. Upon his death, Vidal bequeathed the entirety of his estate, valued at $37 million, to Harvard University.

Postmortem opinions and assessments of Vidal as a writer vary. The New York Times called him "an Augustan figure who believed himself to be the last of a breed, and he was probably right. Few American writers have been more versatile, or gotten more mileage from their talent." The Los Angeles Times said he was a literary juggernaut whose novels and essays were considered "among the most elegant in the English language". The Washington Post described him as a "major writer of the modern era ... [an] astonishingly versatile man of letters".

The Guardian wrote, "Vidal's critics disparaged his tendency to formulate an aphorism, rather than to argue, finding in his work an underlying note of contempt for those who did not agree with him. His fans, on the other hand, delighted in his unflagging wit and elegant style." The Daily Telegraph called Vidal "an icy iconoclast" who "delighted in chronicling what he perceived as the disintegration of civilisation around him". The BBC News said he was "one of the finest post-war American writers ... an indefatigable critic of the whole American system ... Gore Vidal saw himself as the last of the breed of literary figures who became celebrities in their own right. Never a stranger to chat shows, his wry and witty opinions were sought after as much as his writing." In "The Culture of the United States Laments the Death of Gore Vidal", the Spanish online magazine Ideal wrote that Vidal's death was a loss to the "culture of the United States" and called him a "great American novelist and essayist". In The Writer Gore Vidal is Dead in Los Angeles, the online edition of the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera called Vidal "the enfant terrible of American culture" and "one of the giants of American literature". In Gore Vidal: The Killjoy of America, the French newspaper Le Figaro said that the public intellectual Vidal was "the killjoy of America" but that he also was an "outstanding polemicist" who used words "like high-precision weapons".

On August 23, 2012, in the program A Memorial for Gore Vidal in Manhattan, Vidal's life and works were celebrated at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, with a revival of The Best Man: A Play About Politics (1960). The writer and comedian Dick Cavett hosted the celebration, which featured personal reminiscences about and performances of excerpts of Vidal's work by friends and colleagues, such as Elizabeth Ashley, Candice Bergen, Hillary Clinton, Alan Cumming, James Earl Jones, Elaine May, Michael Moore, Susan Sarandon, Cybill Shepherd, and Liz Smith.

In the 1960s, Vidal selected the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison to archive his papers, given his early focus on film. In 2002, he transferred his papers to Houghton Library at Harvard University, where they remain.

The character Brinker Hadley in John Knowles's 1959 novel A Separate Peace is based on Vidal. Knowles and Vidal attended Philips Exeter Academy together, Vidal two years ahead of Knowles. Vidal acknowledged the connection and professed admiration for the novel in his memoir.

In the 1960s, the weekly American sketch comedy television program Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In featured a running-joke sketch about Vidal; the telephone operator Ernestine (Lily Tomlin) would call him, saying: "Mr. Veedle, this is the phone company calling! (snort! snort!)." The sketch, titled "Mr. Veedle", also appeared in Tomlin's comedy record album This Is a Recording (1972).

Vidal provided his own voice for the animated-cartoon version of himself in The Simpsons episode "Moe'N'a Lisa". He also voiced his animated-cartoon version in Family Guy. He was interviewed in the Da Ali G Show; Ali G mistakes him for Vidal Sassoon, a famous hairdresser.

The Buckley-Vidal debates, their aftermath and cultural significance, were the focus of the 2015 documentary film Best of Enemies, as well as the 2021 play by James Graham inspired by the film.

In season eight, episode eight of The Office, "Gettysburg", Oscar Martinez calls Dwight Schrute "Gore Vidal" when Dwight tries to explain his version of history naming the "Battle of Schrute Farms" as the northernmost battle in the Civil War. Dwight responds to Oscar that he doesn't "know who that is".

The Narratives of Empire series (chronological order rather than release order):