A short life of the author
Gore Vidal (3 October 1925 – 31 July 2012) was an American novelist, essayist, playwright, screenwriter, and public intellectual who produced one of the most prolific and various bodies of work in twentieth-century American literature: more than twenty-five novels, hundreds of essays, plays, screenplays, and several volumes of memoir. His historical novels — the seven-book Narratives of Empire series — constitute the most ambitious fictional treatment of American political history ever attempted. His essays are among the finest in the language. His public persona — aristocratic, witty, combative, scandalous — made him the last of the great American literary personalities.
Life
Vidal was born Eugene Luther Gore Vidal Jr. at the United States Military Academy at West Point, where his father, Eugene Luther Vidal, was an aeronautics instructor (and later the first director of what became the Federal Aviation Administration). His maternal grandfather was Thomas Pryor Gore, the blind senator from Oklahoma — a connection that gave Vidal an early, intimate knowledge of American political life.
He grew up in Washington, D.C., attended Phillips Exeter Academy, and enlisted in the Army at seventeen. He served in the Aleutian Islands during World War II, and the experience became the basis for his first novel, Williwaw (1946), published when he was twenty. His third novel, The City and the Pillar (1948) — which depicted a homosexual love affair matter-of-factly, without the conventional punishment or pathology — caused a scandal and was effectively blacklisted by the New York Times, which refused to review his next five books.
Vidal responded by writing under pseudonyms (mysteries as Edgar Box), turning to Hollywood screenwriting (he contributed to Ben-Hur, Suddenly, Last Summer, and other films), and writing for Broadway and television. He ran for Congress in 1960 (losing narrowly) and for the U.S. Senate in 1982 (losing badly). He lived for decades in Ravello, Italy, on the Amalfi Coast.
The Narratives of Empire
Vidal’s most sustained achievement is the seven-novel series that traces American political history from the Revolution to the mid-twentieth century: Washington, D.C. (1967), Burr (1973), 1876 (1976), Lincoln (1984), Empire (1987), Hollywood (1990), and The Golden Age (2000). Read in internal chronological order, they cover American history from Aaron Burr to the Cold War.
Burr is the masterpiece of the series — a novel narrated partly by Aaron Burr himself, reimagining the founding generation as ambitious, flawed, politically ruthless men rather than the marble icons of patriotic mythology. Vidal’s Jefferson is a hypocrite, his Hamilton a scheming monarchist, his Washington a lucky mediocrity. The irreverence is bracing and the historical research formidable.
Lincoln is the most commercially successful — a sympathetic but unsentimental portrait of Lincoln during the Civil War years, seen primarily through the eyes of those around him. Empire and Hollywood chronicle the rise of American imperial power and mass media in the early twentieth century.
Other Fiction
Julian (1964) — a historical novel about the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate, who attempted to restore paganism — is one of Vidal’s most accomplished novels. Myra Breckinridge (1968) — a satire of Hollywood, gender, and sexuality featuring a transsexual protagonist — was a scandalous bestseller. Creation (1981) imagines a Persian diplomat who meets Confucius, the Buddha, and Socrates.
The Essays
Vidal’s essays — collected in United States: Essays 1952–1992 (1993, National Book Award winner) — are among the finest in American letters. He wrote with authority and wit about politics, literature, history, religion, and sex. His literary essays — on Italo Calvino, Dawn Powell, William Dean Howells, and the state of the American novel — are models of critical intelligence. His political essays — on the national security state, the imperial presidency, and American decline — are prescient and savage.
The Feuds and the Public Persona
Vidal’s public feuds — with Norman Mailer (who headbutted him at a party after Vidal compared him to Charles Manson), with Truman Capote (who called him a liar on television, provoking a lawsuit), and above all with William F. Buckley Jr. (who called him a “queer” on live television during the 1968 Democratic Convention, provoking Vidal to call him a “crypto-Nazi”) — were partly temperamental, partly strategic, and partly an expression of genuine intellectual disagreement about the nature of American power.
The Buckley feud was the most consequential. It dramatised, on live television, the fundamental conflict of postwar American politics: Vidal’s patrician radicalism against Buckley’s patrician conservatism, two men from the same class arguing about whether American empire was a betrayal or a fulfilment of the Republic. Their 1968 debates have been studied as a turning point in the relationship between intellectuals and television — the moment when political argument became entertainment, foreshadowing the cable-news shouting matches that followed.
Critical Standing
Vidal was simultaneously overestimated as a public figure and underestimated as a novelist. The feuds, the television appearances, and the aristocratic persona obscured the seriousness and ambition of his fiction. The Narratives of Empire series deserves to be ranked among the major achievements of postwar American fiction. His essays, collected in United States, are arguably his most durable legacy — they belong in the company of Edmund Wilson, H.L. Mencken, and Mary McCarthy as the finest American literary-political prose of the century.
The problem of reputation is compounded by the sheer quantity of his output. He wrote too much, and the late novels — Duluth (1983), Live from Golgotha (1992) — are forced and tired. But the best work — Burr, Lincoln, Julian, the essays — is work of the first order, and Vidal’s insistence that American literature should engage with American history and politics remains a necessary corrective to the solipsism of much contemporary fiction.
Collecting Vidal
Williwaw (1946, Dutton) in first edition brings $200–$800. The City and the Pillar (1948) brings $200–$600. Burr (1973, Random House) brings $30–$100. Signed copies are available; Vidal signed readily throughout his life.