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Gore Vidal

Eugene Luther Gore Vidal (/vɪˈdɑːl/; born Eugene Louis Vidal, October 3, 1925 – July 31, 2012) was an American writer and public intellectual known for his epigrammatic wit. His novels and essays interrogated the social and sexual norms he perceived as driving American life.

Gore Vidal
Vidal c. 1948
Born
Eugene Louis Vidal

(1925-10-03)October 3, 1925
DiedJuly 31, 2012(2012-07-31) (aged 86)
Resting placeRock Creek Cemetery
Other namesEugene Luther Vidal Jr.
EducationPhillips Exeter Academy
Occupations
  • Writer
  • novelist
  • essayist
  • playwright
  • screenwriter
  • actor
Known for
Political party
MovementPostmodernism
Partners
See list
Parents
Relatives
See list
Chairman of the People's Party
In office
November 27, 1970 – November 7, 1972
Military career
Service/branchUnited States Army
Years of service1943–1946
RankWarrant officer
Battles/warsWorld War II

Beyond literature, Vidal was heavily involved in politics. He unsuccessfully sought office twice as a Democratic Party candidate, first in 1960 to the U.S. House of Representatives (for New York), and later in 1982 to the U.S. Senate (for California).

A grandson of U.S. Senator Thomas Gore, Vidal was born into an upper-class political family. As a political commentator and essayist, Vidal's primary focus was the history and society of the United States, especially how a militaristic foreign policy reduced the country to a decadent empire.[1] 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, Gore 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 the psychology of his characters.[2] His third novel, The City and the Pillar (1948), offended the literary, political, and moral sensibilities of conservative book reviewers, the plot being about a dispassionately presented male homosexual relationship.[3] In the historical novel genre, Vidal recreated the imperial world of Julian the Apostate (r. AD 361–363) in Julian (1964). Julian was the Roman emperor who attempted to re-establish Roman polytheism to counter Christianity.[4] In social satire, Myra Breckinridge (1968) explores the mutability of gender roles and sexual orientation as being social constructs established by social mores.[5]: 94–100  In Burr (1973) and Lincoln (1984), 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 the national politics of the United States.[6]: 439 [5]: 75–85 

Early life edit

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).[7][8] 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".[9] In the memoir Palimpsest (1995), Vidal said, "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."[6]: 401 

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".[10]: xix  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."[10]: 4  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.'"[9][10]: xx 

His father, Eugene Luther Vidal Sr., was director (1933–1937) of the Commerce Department's Bureau of Air Commerce during the Roosevelt Administration, and was also the great love of the aviator Amelia Earhart.[11][12] At the U.S. Military Academy, the exceptionally athletic Vidal Sr. had been a quarterback, coach, and captain of the football team; and an all-American basketball player. Subsequently, he competed in the 1920 Summer Olympics and in the 1924 Summer Olympics (seventh in the decathlon, and coach of the U.S. pentathlon).[13][14] 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.[6]: 12 

Gore's great-grandfather Eugen Fidel Vidal was born in Feldkirch, Austria, of Romansh background, and had come to the U.S. with Gore's Swiss great-grandmother, Emma Hartmann.[15]

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.[16] In 1922, Nina married Eugene Luther Vidal Sr. and thirteen years later, in 1935, divorced him.[17] Nina Gore Vidal then was 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.[18] As Nina Gore Auchincloss, Vidal's mother was an alternate delegate to the 1940 Democratic National Convention.[19]

The subsequent marriages of his mother and father yielded four half-siblings for Gore Vidal—Vance Vidal, Valerie Vidal, Thomas Gore Auchincloss, and Nina Gore Auchincloss—one step-brother, Hugh D. "Yusha" Auchincloss III from his mother's second marriage to Hugh D. Auchincloss, and four step-brothers including Robin Olds from his mother's third marriage to Robert Olds, a major general in the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF), who died in 1943, 10 months after marrying Nina.[20] Through Auchincloss, Vidal also was the step-brother once removed of Jacqueline Kennedy. The nephews of Gore Vidal include Burr Steers, a writer and film director, and Hugh Auchincloss Steers (1963–1995), a figurative painter.[21][22]

Raised in Washington, D.C., Vidal attended the Sidwell Friends School and St. Albans School. Given the blindness of his maternal grandfather, Senator Thomas Pryor Gore, of Oklahoma, Vidal read aloud to him, and was his Senate page, and his seeing-eye guide.[23] In 1939, during his summer holiday, Vidal went with some colleagues and a professor from St. Albans School on his first European trip to visit Italy and France. He visited Rome for the first time, the city which came to be "at the center of Gore's literary imagination," and Paris. When the Second World War began in early September, the group was forced to return home early. On his way back, he and his colleagues stopped in Great Britain, where they met the U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain, Joe Kennedy (the father of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, later the President of the United States of America).[24] In 1940 he attended the Los Alamos Ranch School and later transferred to Phillips Exeter Academy, in Exeter, New Hampshire, where he contributed to the Exonian, the school newspaper.[25]

Rather than attend university, Vidal enlisted in the U.S. Army at age 17 and was assigned to work as an office clerk in the USAAF. Later, Vidal passed the examinations necessary to become a maritime warrant officer (junior grade) in the Transportation Corps, and subsequently served as first mate of the F.S. 35th, a US Army Freight and Supply (FS) ship berthed at Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands. After three years in service, Vidal suffered hypothermia, developed rheumatoid arthritis and, consequently, was reassigned to duty as a mess officer.[26]

Literary career edit

Vidal's literary works were influenced by numerous other writers, poets and playwrights, novelists and essayists. These include, from antiquity, Petronius (d. AD 66), Juvenal (AD 60–140), and Apuleius (fl. c. AD 155); and from the post-Renaissance, Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866), and George Meredith (1828–1909). More recent literary influences included Marcel Proust (1871–1922), Henry James (1843–1916), and Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966).[27] The cultural critic Harold Bloom has written that Vidal believed that his sexuality had denied him full recognition from the literary community in the United States. Bloom himself contends that such limited recognition resulted more from Vidal's "best fictions" being "distinguished historical novels", a subgenre "no longer available for canonization".[28]

Fiction edit

 
Vidal at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, 2008

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 the Second World War.[29] 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.[30] 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, killed in the Battle of Iwo Jima on March 1, 1945, and that Trimble was the only person he ever loved.[31][32] Critics railed against Vidal's presentation of homosexuality in the novel as natural, as it was viewed generally at the time as unnatural and immoral.[30] Vidal claimed 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.[33] Vidal said that upon publication of the book, 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."[30] Today, Vidal is often seen as an early champion of sexual liberation.[34]

Vidal took the pseudonym "Edgar Box" and 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 black-listed Vidal a secret living.[35][36] That mystery-novel success led Vidal to write in other genres, where he produced 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.[37] He also wrote the pulp novel Thieves Fall Out under the pseudonym Cameron Kay but refused to have it reprinted under his real name during his life.[38]

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 Julian viewed that Christianity threatened the cultural integrity of the Roman Empire; Washington, D.C. (1967), about political life during the presidential era of Franklin D. Roosevelt (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 upon the essay and developed two types of fiction. The first type is about American history, novels specifically about the nature of national politics.[39] 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."[40] 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.), with the novel Creation (1981). The novel was published without four chapters that were part of the manuscript he submitted to the publisher; years later, Vidal restored the chapters to the text and re-published the novel 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 Macedonia, in the early days of Christianity; and The Smithsonian Institution (1998), a time-travel story.

Non-fiction edit

 
Vidal's historical novel 1876 (1976)

In the United States, Vidal is often considered an essayist rather than a novelist.[41] Even the occasionally hostile literary critic, such as Martin Amis, admitted that "Essays are what he is good at ... [Vidal] is learned, funny, and exceptionally clear-sighted. Even his blind spots are illuminating."

For six decades, Vidal applied himself to socio-political, 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 U.S. president, Ronald Reagan, as a "triumph of the embalmer's art" communicated that Reagan's provincial worldview, and that of his administration's, was out of date and inadequate to the geopolitical realities of the world in the late twentieth century. In 1993, Vidal won the National Book Award for Nonfiction for the anthology United States: Essays 1952–92 (1993).[42]

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".[43] In the same year, the Man of Letters Gore Vidal was named honorary president of the American Humanist Association.[44][30]

Hollywood edit

 
Vidal (second from right) supporting the 1981 Writers Guild of America strike

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 the Ben-Hur screenplay, on location in Italy, Vidal negotiated the early termination (at the two-year mark) of his four-year contract with MGM.[6]: 301–307 

36 years later, in the documentary film The Celluloid Closet (1995), 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 homosexual subtext to the scene and that the director, the producer and the screenwriter agreed to keep Heston ignorant of the subtext, lest he refuse to play the scene.[6]: 306  In turn, on learning of that explanation, Heston said that Vidal had contributed little to the script of Ben-Hur.[45] 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.[46]

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. Billy the Kid (1989) is one, about William H. Bonney, a gunman in the New Mexico territory Lincoln County War (1878), and later an outlaw in the U.S. Western frontier. Another is 1979's Caligula (based upon the life of the Roman Emperor Caligula),[47] from which Vidal had his screenwriter credit removed because the producer, Bob Guccione, the director, Tinto Brass, and the leading actor, Malcolm McDowell, rewrote the script to add extra sex and violence 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.

Politics edit

Political campaigns edit

 
Vidal speaking for the People's Party in 1972

Vidal began to drift towards the political left after he received his first paycheck, and realized how much money the government took in tax.[48] He reasoned that if the government was taking so much money, then it should at least provide first-rate healthcare and education.[48]

As a public intellectual, Vidal was identified with the liberal politicians and the progressive social causes of the old Democratic Party.[49][50]

In 1960, Vidal was the Democratic candidate for Congress for the 29th Congressional District of New York, a usually Republican district that including most of the Catskills and the western bank of the Hudson River, including Newburgh, but lost to the Republican candidate J. Ernest Wharton, by a margin of 57 percent to 43 percent.[51] Campaigning under the slogan of You'll get more with Gore, Vidal received the most votes any Democratic candidate had received in the district in fifty years and outpolled John F. Kennedy (who lost the district with 38 percent of the vote).[52] Among his supporters were Eleanor Roosevelt and Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, friends who spoke on his behalf.[53]

In 1982, he campaigned against Jerry Brown, the incumbent Governor of California, in the Democratic primary election for the U.S. Senate; Vidal forecast accurately that the opposing Republican candidate (Pete Wilson) would win the election.[54] That foray into senatorial politics is the subject of the documentary film Gore Vidal: The Man Who Said No (1983), directed by Gary Conklin.

 
In 2001, Vanity Fair published an article by Vidal on Timothy McVeigh. The article attempts to understand why McVeigh perpetrated the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

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, 1990–91) 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 that the U.S. Army had mistreated the Iraqis. In concluding the Vanity Fair article, Vidal refers to McVeigh as an "unlikely sole mover", and theorizes that foreign/domestic conspiracies could have been involved.[55]

Vidal was very much against any kind of military intervention in the world.[56] In Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta (2002), Vidal drew parallels about how the United States enters wars and said that President Franklin D. Roosevelt provoked Imperial Japan to attack the U.S. in order to justify the American entry to the Second World War (1939–45). He contended that Roosevelt had advance knowledge of the dawn-raid attack on Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941).[57] In the documentary Why We Fight (2005), Vidal said that, during the final months of the war, the Japanese had tried to surrender: "They were trying to surrender all that summer, but Truman wouldn't listen, because Truman wanted to drop the bombs ... To show off. To frighten Stalin. To change the balance of power in the world. To declare war on communism. Perhaps we were starting a pre-emptive world war".[58]

Criticism of George W. Bush edit

 
Vidal and ex-senator George McGovern at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, August 26, 2009

As a public intellectual, Vidal criticized what he viewed as political harm to the nation and the voiding of the citizen's rights through the passage of the USA Patriot Act (2001) during the George W. Bush administration (2001–2009). He described Bush as "the stupidest man in the United States" and said that Bush's foreign policy was explicitly expansionist.[59][60] He contended that the Bush Administration and their oil-business sponsors, aimed to control the petroleum of Central Asia, after having gained hegemony over the petroleum of the Persian Gulf in 1991.[61]

Vidal became a member of the board of advisors of The World Can't Wait, a political organization which sought to publicly repudiate the foreign-policy program of the Bush Administration (2001–2009) and advocated Bush's impeachment for war crimes, such as the Second Iraq War (2003–2011) and torturing prisoners of war (soldiers, guerrillas, civilians) in violation of international law.[62]

In May 2007, while discussing 9/11 conspiracy theories that might explain the "who?" and the "why?" of the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., Vidal said

I'm not a conspiracy theorist, I'm a conspiracy analyst. Everything the Bushites touch is screwed up. They could never have pulled off 9/11, even if they wanted to. Even if they longed to. They could step aside, though, or just go out to lunch while these terrible things were happening to the nation. I believe that of them.[63]

Political philosophy edit

 
Vidal, ca. 1978

In the American Conservative article "My Pen Pal Gore Vidal" (2012), Bill Kauffman reported that Vidal's favorite American politician, during his lifetime, was Huey Long (1893–1935), the populist Governor (1928–32) and Senator (1932–35) from Louisiana, who also had perceived the essential, one-party nature of U.S. politics and who was assassinated by a lone gunman called Carl Weiss.[64]

Despite that, Vidal said, "I think of myself as a conservative", with a proprietary attitude towards 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".[65][66] Based upon that background of populism, from 1970 to 1972, Vidal was a chairman of the People's Party of the United States.[67] In 1971, he endorsed the consumer-rights advocate Ralph Nader for U.S. president in the 1972 election.[68] In 2007, he endorsed Democrat Dennis Kucinich in his candidacy for the U.S. presidency (in 2008), because Kucinich was "the most eloquent of the lot" of presidential candidates, from either the Republican or the Democratic parties and that Kucinich was "very much a favorite out there, in the amber fields of grain".[69]

In a September 30, 2009 interview with The Times of London, Vidal said that 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 is rotting away – and to not expect Barack Obama to save the country and the nation from imperial decay. In this interview, he also updated his views of his life, the United States, and other political subjects.[70] Vidal had earlier described what he saw as the political and cultural rot in the United States 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.[71]

Feuds edit

The Capote–Vidal feud edit

In 1975, Vidal sued Truman Capote for slander, over the accusation that he had once been thrown out of the White House for being drunk, putting his arm around First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, and then insulting her mother.[40] Said Capote of Vidal at the time: "I'm always sad about Gore—very sad that he has to breathe every day."[72] Mutual friend George Plimpton observed: "There's no venom like Capote's when he's on the prowl—and Gore's too, I don't know what division the feud should be in." The suit was settled in Vidal's favor when Lee Radziwill refused to testify on Capote's behalf, telling columnist Liz Smith, "Oh, Liz, what do we care; they're just a couple of fags! They're disgusting."[72][73]

The Buckley–Vidal feud edit

 
The feud between Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr. (pictured) lasted until the latter's death in 2008.

In 1968, the ABC television network hired the liberal Vidal and the conservative William F. Buckley Jr. as political analysts of the presidential-nomination conventions of the Republican and Democratic parties.[74] After days of bickering, their debates deteriorated to vitriolic ad hominem attacks. During a moment of crosstalk while discussing the 1968 Democratic National Convention protests, the pair argued about freedom of speech; namely, the legality of protesters to display a Viet Cong flag in America, Vidal snapped at Buckley to "shut up a minute." Moments later, the following exchange transpired:

BUCKLEY: Some people were pro-Nazi, and the answer is that they were well-treated by people who ostracized them. And I'm for ostracizing people who egg on other people to shoot American Marines and American soldiers.

VIDAL: As far as I'm concerned, the only sort of pro- or crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself. Failing that, I would only say that we can't have—

BUCKLEY: Now listen you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi, or I'll sock you in your goddamn face, and you'll stay plastered.

ABC's Howard K. Smith intervened, and the debate resumed without violence.[54][75] Later, Buckley said he regretted having called Vidal a "queer", but still expressed some distaste for Vidal when he said that he was an "evangelist for bisexuality".[76]

In 1969, in Esquire magazine, Buckley continued his cultural feud with Vidal in the essay "On Experiencing Gore Vidal" (August 1969), in which he portrayed Vidal as an apologist for homosexuality; Buckley said, "The man who, in his essays, proclaims the normalcy of his affliction [i.e., homosexuality], and in his art the desirability of it, is not to be confused with the man who bears his sorrow quietly. The addict is to be pitied and even respected, not the pusher." The essay is collected in The Governor Listeth: A Book of Inspired Political Revelations (1970), an anthology of Buckley's writings from the time.[77]

Vidal riposted in Esquire with the September 1969 essay "A Distasteful Encounter with William F. Buckley, Jr." and said that Buckley was "anti-black", "anti-semitic" and a "warmonger".[78] Buckley sued Vidal for libel.[79]

The feud continued in Esquire, where Vidal implied that in 1944, Buckley and unnamed siblings had vandalized a Protestant church in Sharon, Connecticut (the Buckley family hometown) after the wife of a pastor had sold a house to a Jewish family. Additionally, Vidal later claimed to know for a fact that Buckley was "rather infatuated" with him. Buckley again sued Vidal and Esquire for libel and Vidal filed a counterclaim for libel against Buckley, citing Buckley's characterization of Myra Breckinridge (1968) as a pornographic novel.[80][81] The court dismissed Vidal's counterclaim.[82] Buckley accepted a money settlement of $115,000 to pay the fee of his attorney and an editorial apology from Esquire, in which the publisher and the editors said that they were "utterly convinced" of the untruthfulness of Vidal's assertions.[83] In a letter to Newsweek magazine, the publisher of Esquire said that "the settlement of Buckley's suit against us" was not "a 'disavowal' of Vidal's article. On the contrary, it clearly states that we published that article because we believed that Vidal had a right to assert his opinions, even though we did not share them."[84]

In Gore Vidal: A Biography (1999), Fred Kaplan said that "The court had 'not' sustained Buckley's case against Esquire ... [that] the court had 'not' ruled that Vidal's article was 'defamatory'. It had ruled that the case would have to go to trial in order to determine, as a matter of fact, whether or not it was defamatory. The cash value of the settlement with Esquire represented 'only' Buckley's legal expenses."[84]

In 2003, Buckley resumed his complaint of having been libeled by Vidal, this time with the publication of the anthology Esquire's Big Book of Great Writing (2003), which included Vidal's essay "A Distasteful Encounter with William F. Buckley, Jr." Again, the offended Buckley filed lawsuit for libel and Esquire magazine again settled Buckley's claim with $55,000–65,000 for the fees of his attorney and $10,000 for personal damages suffered by Buckley.[85]

In the obituary "RIP WFB – in Hell" (March 20, 2008), Vidal remembered Buckley, who had died on February 27, 2008.[86] Later, in the interview "Literary Lion: Questions for Gore Vidal" (June 15, 2008), New York Times reporter Deborah Solomon asked Vidal: "How did you feel, when you heard that Buckley died this year?" Vidal responded:[87]

I thought hell is bound to be a livelier place, as he joins, forever, those whom he served in life, applauding their prejudices and fanning their hatred.

The Mailer–Vidal feud edit

On December 15, 1971, during the recording of The Dick Cavett Show, with Janet Flanner, Norman Mailer allegedly head-butted Vidal when they were backstage.[88] When a reporter asked Vidal why Mailer had knocked heads with him, Vidal said, "Once again, words failed Norman Mailer."[89] During the recording of the talk show, Vidal and Mailer insulted each other, over what Vidal had written about him, prompting Mailer to say, "I've had to smell your works from time to time." Apparently, Mailer's umbrage resulted from Vidal's reference to Mailer having stabbed his wife of the time.[90]

Views edit

Polanski rape case edit

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 Switzerland, in September 2009, 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 thirteen-year-old girl in Hollywood, 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 for elaboration, Vidal explained the cultural temper of the U.S. and of the Hollywood movie business in the 1970s:[91]

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 [2009] from what it was then [1970s] ... 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."[91]

In response to Vidal's opinion about the decades-old Polanski rape 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 [psychological] wounds of (the victims)" of sexual abuse.[92]

Scientology edit

In 1997, Vidal was one of thirty-four 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".[93] Scientologists are free to operate in Germany; the Church of Scientology, however, is not recognized as a religious body but as a business with political goals and thus monitored by the German domestic intelligence service.[94][95] Despite signing the letter, Vidal was critical of Scientology as a religion.[96]

Sexuality edit

In 1967, Vidal appeared in the CBS documentary CBS Reports: The Homosexuals, in which he expressed his views on homosexuality in the arts.[97] Commenting on his life's work and his life, he described his style as "Knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn."[30]

Vidal often rebutted the label of "gay". He maintained that it referred to sexual acts rather than sexuality. Gore did not express a public stance on the HIV-AIDS crisis. According to Vidal's close friend Jay Parini, "Gore didn't think of himself as a gay guy. It makes him self-hating. How could he despise gays as much as he did? In my company he always used the term 'fags'. He was uncomfortable with being gay. Then again, he was wildly courageous." Biographer Fred Kaplan concluded: "He was not interested in making a difference for gay people, or being an advocate for gay rights. There was no such thing as 'straight' or 'gay' for him, just the body and sex."[98]

In the September 1969 edition of Esquire, Vidal wrote:[78][30]

We are all bisexual to begin with. That is a fact of our condition. And we are all responsive to sexual stimuli from our own as well as from the opposite sex. Certain societies at certain times, usually in the interest of maintaining the baby supply, have discouraged homosexuality. Other societies, particularly militaristic ones, have exalted it. But regardless of tribal taboos, homosexuality is a constant fact of the human condition and it is not a sickness, not a sin, not a crime ... despite the best efforts of our puritan tribe to make it all three. Homosexuality is as natural as heterosexuality. Notice I use the word 'natural,' not normal.

Personal life edit

 
Vidal as a young man

In the multi-volume memoir The Diary of Anaïs Nin (1931–74), Anaïs Nin said she had a love affair with Vidal, who denied her claim in his memoir Palimpsest (1995). In the online article "Gore Vidal's Secret, Unpublished Love Letter to Anaïs Nin" (2013), author Kim Krizan said she found an unpublished love letter from Vidal to Nin, which contradicts his denial of a love affair with Nin. Krizan said she found the love letter while researching Mirages, the latest volume of Nin's uncensored diary, to which Krizan wrote the foreword.[99] Vidal would cruise the streets and bars of New York City and other locales and wrote in his memoir that by age twenty-five, he had had more than a thousand sexual encounters.[100] Vidal also said that he had an intermittent romance with the actress Diana Lynn, and alluded to possibly having fathered a daughter.[6]: 290 [101] He was briefly engaged to the actress Joanne Woodward before she married the actor Paul Newman; after marrying, they briefly shared a house with Vidal in Los Angeles.[102]

Vidal enjoyed telling his sexual exploits to friends. Vidal claimed to have slept with Fred Astaire when he first moved to Hollywood and also with a young Dennis Hopper.[98]

In 1950, Vidal met Howard Austen, who became his partner for the next 53 years, until Austen's death.[103] He said that the secret to his long relationship with Austen was that they did not have sex with each other: "It's easy to sustain a relationship when sex plays no part, and impossible, I have observed, when it does."[104] In Celebrity: The Advocate Interviews (1995), by Judy Wiedner, Vidal said that he refused to call himself "gay" because he was not an adjective, adding "to be categorized is, simply, to be enslaved. Watch out. I have never thought of myself as a victim ... I've said—a thousand times?—in print and on TV, that everyone is bisexual."[105]

In the course of his life, Vidal lived at various times in Italy and in the United States. In 2003, as his health began to fail with age, he sold his Italian villa La Rondinaia (The Swallow's Nest) on the Amalfi Coast in the province of Salerno and he and Austen returned to live in their 1929[106] villa in Outpost Estates, Los Angeles.[107] Howard Austen died in November 2003 and in February 2005 his remains were re-buried at Rock Creek Cemetery, in Washington, D.C., in a joint grave plot that Vidal had purchased for himself and Austen.[108]

Death edit

 
The grave of Gore Vidal in Rock Creek Cemetery.

In 2010, Vidal began to suffer from Wernicke–Korsakoff syndrome, a neurological disorder caused by his years of alcohol abuse.[109] On July 31, 2012, Vidal died of pneumonia at his home in the Hollywood Hills at the age of 86.[109][110][111] A memorial service was held for him at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre in New York City on August 23, 2012.[112] He was buried next to Howard Austen in Rock Creek Cemetery, in Washington, D.C.[113] Vidal said he chose his grave site 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.[114] Upon his death, Vidal bequeathed the entirety of his estate, valued at $37 million,[115] to Harvard University.[116]

Legacy edit

Postmortem opinions and assessments of Vidal as a writer varied. The New York Times described him as "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."[117] The Los Angeles Times said that he was a literary juggernaut whose novels and essays were considered "among the most elegant in the English language".[118] The Washington Post described him as a "major writer of the modern era ... [an] astonishingly versatile man of letters".[119]

The Guardian said that "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."[120] The Daily Telegraph described the writer as "an icy iconoclast" who "delighted in chronicling what he perceived as the disintegration of civilisation around him".[121] The BBC News said that 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."[122] In "The Culture of the United States Laments the Death of Gore Vidal", the Spanish on-line magazine Ideal said that Vidal's death was a loss to the "culture of the United States" and described him as a "great American novelist and essayist".[123] In The Writer Gore Vidal is Dead in Los Angeles, the online edition of the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera described the novelist as "the enfant terrible of American culture" and that he was "one of the giants of American literature".[124] 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".[125]

On August 23, 2012, in the program a Memorial for Gore Vidal in Manhattan, the life and works of the writer Gore Vidal 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 was host of the Vidalian celebration, which featured personal reminiscences about and performances of excerpts from the works of Vidal 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.[126]

In the 1960s, Vidal selected the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research at the University of Wisconsin to archive his papers given his early focus on film. In 2002, Vidal transferred his papers to Houghton Library at Harvard University where they are housed to this day.[127]

In popular culture edit

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. Veedul, this is the Phone Company calling! (snort! snort!)."[128][129] The sketch, titled "Mr. Veedle", also appeared in Tomlin's comedy record album This Is a Recording (1972).[130]

Vidal provided his own voice for the animated-cartoon version of himself in The Simpsons episode "Moe'N'a Lisa".[131] He also voiced his animated-cartoon version in Family Guy.[132] He was interviewed in the Da Ali G Show; the Ali G character mistakes him for Vidal Sassoon, a famous hairdresser.[133]

The Buckley–Vidal debates, their aftermath and cultural significance, were the focus of a 2015 documentary film called Best of Enemies, as well as a 2021 play by James Graham, inspired by the film.[134][135]

In season eight, episode eight of The Office titled "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".

A Netflix biopic titled Gore was filmed in 2017. It was directed and co-written by Michael Hoffman, and based on Jay Parini's book Empire of Self, A Life of Gore Vidal. The film, which starred Kevin Spacey in the title role, was cancelled and remains unreleased due to sexual misconduct allegations made against Spacey.[136][137]

Selected list of works edit

Filmography edit

Year Title Role Notes
1972 Roma Himself Uncredited
1992 Bob Roberts Senator Brikley Paiste
1994 With Honors Pitkannen
1997 Shadow Conspiracy Congressman Page
Gattaca Director Josef
2002 Igby Goes Down First School Headmaster Uncredited
2009 Shrink George Charles

See also edit

References edit

  1. ^ Vidal, Gore (April 1, 2013). I Told You So: Gore Vidal Talks Politics: Interviews with Jon Wiener. Catapult. pp. 54–55. ISBN 978-1-61902-212-6.
  2. ^ Murphy, Bruce. Benét's Reader's Encyclopedia (4th ed.). HarperCollins Publishers (1996), p. 1080.
  3. ^ Terry, C. V. New York Times Book Review, "The City and the Pillar", January 11, 1948, p. 22.
  4. ^ Hornblower, Simon & Spawforth, Editors. The Oxford Companion to Classical Civilization Oxford University Press (1998), pp. 383–384.
  5. ^ a b Kiernan, Robert F (1982). Gore Vidal. Frederick Ungar Publishing. ISBN 9780804424615. Retrieved February 16, 2020.
  6. ^ a b c d e f Vidal, Gore (1995). Palimpsest: A Memoir. New York: Random House. ISBN 9780679440383. Retrieved February 16, 2020.
  7. ^ Vidal, Gore, "West Point and the Third Loyalty July 15, 2014, at the Wayback Machine", The New York Review of Books, Volume 20, Number 16, October 18, 1973.
  8. ^ . August 25, 2013. Archived from the original on August 27, 2013 – via YouTube.
  9. ^ a b Kaplan, Fred (1999). "Excerpt: Gore Vidal, A Biography". The New York Times. from the original on May 10, 2013. Retrieved June 12, 2013.
  10. ^ a b c Peabody, Richard; Ebersole, Lucinda (February 2005). Conversations with Gore Vidal (Paper ed.). Oxford: University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 9781578066735. Retrieved February 16, 2020.
  11. ^ "Aeronautics: $8,073.61", Time, September 28, 1931
  12. ^ "Booknotes -- East to the Dawn: The Life of Amelia Earhart". C-SPAN. November 13, 1997. Retrieved November 14, 2021.
  13. ^ "Eugene L. Vidal, Aviation Leader". The New York Times. February 21, 1969. p. 43. from the original on July 23, 2018. Retrieved July 23, 2018.
  14. ^ South Dakota Sports Hall of Fame Profile: Gene Vidal. October 16, 2007, at the Wayback Machine
  15. ^ Parini, Jay (2015). Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal June 13, 2020, at the Wayback Machine. New York: Penguin Random House. ISBN 978-0-385-53757-5. Retrieved December 23, 2015
  16. ^ "General Robert Olds Marries". New York Times. June 7, 1942. p. 6.[dead link]
  17. ^ "Miss Nina Gore Marries". The New York Times. January 12, 1922. from the original on June 10, 2020. Retrieved June 10, 2020.
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  22. ^ Durbin, Karen (September 15, 2002). "A Family's Legacy: Pain and Humor (and a Movie)". The New York Times. from the original on April 21, 2017. Retrieved February 8, 2017.
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  130. ^ Record album: This is a Recording, by Lily Tomlin, title: "Mr. Veedle". January 9, 2015, at the Wayback Machine. Rhapsody.
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  136. ^ Stanhope, Kate; McClintock, Pamela (November 3, 2017). "Netflix severs ties with Kevin Spacey, drops 'Gore' movie". The Hollywood Reporter. Los Angeles, California: Eldridge Industries. Retrieved November 4, 2017.
  137. ^ Oldham, Stuart (November 3, 2017). "Kevin Spacey Suspended From 'House of Cards'". Variety. Los Angeles, California: Penske Media Corporation. Retrieved November 4, 2017.

External links edit

gore, vidal, eugene, luther, ɑː, born, eugene, louis, vidal, october, 1925, july, 2012, american, writer, public, intellectual, known, epigrammatic, novels, essays, interrogated, social, sexual, norms, perceived, driving, american, life, vidal, 1948borneugene,. Eugene Luther Gore Vidal v ɪ ˈ d ɑː l born Eugene Louis Vidal October 3 1925 July 31 2012 was an American writer and public intellectual known for his epigrammatic wit His novels and essays interrogated the social and sexual norms he perceived as driving American life Gore VidalVidal c 1948BornEugene Louis Vidal 1925 10 03 October 3 1925West Point New York U S DiedJuly 31 2012 2012 07 31 aged 86 Los Angeles California U S Resting placeRock Creek CemeteryOther namesEugene Luther Vidal Jr EducationPhillips Exeter AcademyOccupationsWriter novelist essayist playwright screenwriter actorKnown forThe City and the Pillar 1948 Julian 1964 Myra Breckinridge 1968 Burr 1973 Lincoln 1984 Political partyDemocratic People s affiliated non member MovementPostmodernismPartnersSee list Anais Nin 1944 1948 Diana Lynn 1949 1950 Joanne Woodward 1950 1951 Howard Austen 1951 2003 ParentsEugene Luther VidalNina S GoreRelativesSee list Thomas Gore grandfather Nina Auchincloss half sister Hugh Steers half nephew Burr Steers half nephew Jimmy Carter fifth cousin Chairman of the People s PartyIn office November 27 1970 November 7 1972Military careerService wbr branchUnited States ArmyYears of service1943 1946RankWarrant officerBattles warsWorld War IIBeyond literature Vidal was heavily involved in politics He unsuccessfully sought office twice as a Democratic Party candidate first in 1960 to the U S House of Representatives for New York and later in 1982 to the U S Senate for California A grandson of U S Senator Thomas Gore Vidal was born into an upper class political family As a political commentator and essayist Vidal s primary focus was the history and society of the United States especially how a militaristic foreign policy reduced the country to a decadent empire 1 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 Gore 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 the psychology of his characters 2 His third novel The City and the Pillar 1948 offended the literary political and moral sensibilities of conservative book reviewers the plot being about a dispassionately presented male homosexual relationship 3 In the historical novel genre Vidal recreated the imperial world of Julian the Apostate r AD 361 363 in Julian 1964 Julian was the Roman emperor who attempted to re establish Roman polytheism to counter Christianity 4 In social satire Myra Breckinridge 1968 explores the mutability of gender roles and sexual orientation as being social constructs established by social mores 5 94 100 In Burr 1973 and Lincoln 1984 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 the national politics of the United States 6 439 5 75 85 Contents 1 Early life 2 Literary career 2 1 Fiction 2 2 Non fiction 2 3 Hollywood 3 Politics 3 1 Political campaigns 3 2 Criticism of George W Bush 3 3 Political philosophy 4 Feuds 4 1 The Capote Vidal feud 4 2 The Buckley Vidal feud 4 3 The Mailer Vidal feud 5 Views 5 1 Polanski rape case 5 2 Scientology 5 3 Sexuality 6 Personal life 7 Death 8 Legacy 8 1 In popular culture 9 Selected list of works 9 1 Filmography 10 See also 11 References 12 External linksEarly life editVidal 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 7 8 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 9 In the memoir Palimpsest 1995 Vidal said 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 6 401 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 10 xix 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 10 4 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 9 10 xx His father Eugene Luther Vidal Sr was director 1933 1937 of the Commerce Department s Bureau of Air Commerce during the Roosevelt Administration and was also the great love of the aviator Amelia Earhart 11 12 At the U S Military Academy the exceptionally athletic Vidal Sr had been a quarterback coach and captain of the football team and an all American basketball player Subsequently he competed in the 1920 Summer Olympics and in the 1924 Summer Olympics seventh in the decathlon and coach of the U S pentathlon 13 14 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 6 12 Gore s great grandfather Eugen Fidel Vidal was born in Feldkirch Austria of Romansh background and had come to the U S with Gore s Swiss great grandmother Emma Hartmann 15 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 16 In 1922 Nina married Eugene Luther Vidal Sr and thirteen years later in 1935 divorced him 17 Nina Gore Vidal then was 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 18 As Nina Gore Auchincloss Vidal s mother was an alternate delegate to the 1940 Democratic National Convention 19 The subsequent marriages of his mother and father yielded four half siblings for Gore Vidal Vance Vidal Valerie Vidal Thomas Gore Auchincloss and Nina Gore Auchincloss one step brother Hugh D Yusha Auchincloss III from his mother s second marriage to Hugh D Auchincloss and four step brothers including Robin Olds from his mother s third marriage to Robert Olds a major general in the United States Army Air Forces USAAF who died in 1943 10 months after marrying Nina 20 Through Auchincloss Vidal also was the step brother once removed of Jacqueline Kennedy The nephews of Gore Vidal include Burr Steers a writer and film director and Hugh Auchincloss Steers 1963 1995 a figurative painter 21 22 Raised in Washington D C Vidal attended the Sidwell Friends School and St Albans School Given the blindness of his maternal grandfather Senator Thomas Pryor Gore of Oklahoma Vidal read aloud to him and was his Senate page and his seeing eye guide 23 In 1939 during his summer holiday Vidal went with some colleagues and a professor from St Albans School on his first European trip to visit Italy and France He visited Rome for the first time the city which came to be at the center of Gore s literary imagination and Paris When the Second World War began in early September the group was forced to return home early On his way back he and his colleagues stopped in Great Britain where they met the U S Ambassador to Great Britain Joe Kennedy the father of John Fitzgerald Kennedy later the President of the United States of America 24 In 1940 he attended the Los Alamos Ranch School and later transferred to Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter New Hampshire where he contributed to the Exonian the school newspaper 25 Rather than attend university Vidal enlisted in the U S Army at age 17 and was assigned to work as an office clerk in the USAAF Later Vidal passed the examinations necessary to become a maritime warrant officer junior grade in the Transportation Corps and subsequently served as first mate of the F S 35th a US Army Freight and Supply FS ship berthed at Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands After three years in service Vidal suffered hypothermia developed rheumatoid arthritis and consequently was reassigned to duty as a mess officer 26 Literary career editVidal s literary works were influenced by numerous other writers poets and playwrights novelists and essayists These include from antiquity Petronius d AD 66 Juvenal AD 60 140 and Apuleius fl c AD 155 and from the post Renaissance Michel de Montaigne 1533 1592 Thomas Love Peacock 1785 1866 and George Meredith 1828 1909 More recent literary influences included Marcel Proust 1871 1922 Henry James 1843 1916 and Evelyn Waugh 1903 1966 27 The cultural critic Harold Bloom has written that Vidal believed that his sexuality had denied him full recognition from the literary community in the United States Bloom himself contends that such limited recognition resulted more from Vidal s best fictions being distinguished historical novels a subgenre no longer available for canonization 28 Fiction edit nbsp Vidal at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books 2008Vidal 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 the Second World War 29 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 30 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 killed in the Battle of Iwo Jima on March 1 1945 and that Trimble was the only person he ever loved 31 32 Critics railed against Vidal s presentation of homosexuality in the novel as natural as it was viewed generally at the time as unnatural and immoral 30 Vidal claimed 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 33 Vidal said that upon publication of the book 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 30 Today Vidal is often seen as an early champion of sexual liberation 34 Vidal took the pseudonym Edgar Box and 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 black listed Vidal a secret living 35 36 That mystery novel success led Vidal to write in other genres where he produced 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 37 He also wrote the pulp novel Thieves Fall Out under the pseudonym Cameron Kay but refused to have it reprinted under his real name during his life 38 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 Julian viewed that Christianity threatened the cultural integrity of the Roman Empire Washington D C 1967 about political life during the presidential era of Franklin D Roosevelt 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 upon the essay and developed two types of fiction The first type is about American history novels specifically about the nature of national politics 39 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 40 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 with the novel Creation 1981 The novel was published without four chapters that were part of the manuscript he submitted to the publisher years later Vidal restored the chapters to the text and re published the novel 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 Macedonia in the early days of Christianity and The Smithsonian Institution 1998 a time travel story Non fiction edit nbsp Vidal s historical novel 1876 1976 In the United States Vidal is often considered an essayist rather than a novelist 41 Even the occasionally hostile literary critic such as Martin Amis admitted that Essays are what he is good at Vidal is learned funny and exceptionally clear sighted Even his blind spots are illuminating For six decades Vidal applied himself to socio political 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 U S president Ronald Reagan as a triumph of the embalmer s art communicated that Reagan s provincial worldview and that of his administration s was out of date and inadequate to the geopolitical realities of the world in the late twentieth century In 1993 Vidal won the National Book Award for Nonfiction for the anthology United States Essays 1952 92 1993 42 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 43 In the same year the Man of Letters Gore Vidal was named honorary president of the American Humanist Association 44 30 Hollywood edit nbsp Vidal second from right supporting the 1981 Writers Guild of America strikeIn 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 the Ben Hur screenplay on location in Italy Vidal negotiated the early termination at the two year mark of his four year contract with MGM 6 301 307 36 years later in the documentary film The Celluloid Closet 1995 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 homosexual subtext to the scene and that the director the producer and the screenwriter agreed to keep Heston ignorant of the subtext lest he refuse to play the scene 6 306 In turn on learning of that explanation Heston said that Vidal had contributed little to the script of Ben Hur 45 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 46 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 Billy the Kid 1989 is one about William H Bonney a gunman in the New Mexico territory Lincoln County War 1878 and later an outlaw in the U S Western frontier Another is 1979 s Caligula based upon the life of the Roman Emperor Caligula 47 from which Vidal had his screenwriter credit removed because the producer Bob Guccione the director Tinto Brass and the leading actor Malcolm McDowell rewrote the script to add extra sex and violence 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 Politics editPolitical campaigns edit nbsp Vidal speaking for the People s Party in 1972Vidal began to drift towards the political left after he received his first paycheck and realized how much money the government took in tax 48 He reasoned that if the government was taking so much money then it should at least provide first rate healthcare and education 48 As a public intellectual Vidal was identified with the liberal politicians and the progressive social causes of the old Democratic Party 49 50 In 1960 Vidal was the Democratic candidate for Congress for the 29th Congressional District of New York a usually Republican district that including most of the Catskills and the western bank of the Hudson River including Newburgh but lost to the Republican candidate J Ernest Wharton by a margin of 57 percent to 43 percent 51 Campaigning under the slogan of You ll get more with Gore Vidal received the most votes any Democratic candidate had received in the district in fifty years and outpolled John F Kennedy who lost the district with 38 percent of the vote 52 Among his supporters were Eleanor Roosevelt and Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward friends who spoke on his behalf 53 In 1982 he campaigned against Jerry Brown the incumbent Governor of California in the Democratic primary election for the U S Senate Vidal forecast accurately that the opposing Republican candidate Pete Wilson would win the election 54 That foray into senatorial politics is the subject of the documentary film Gore Vidal The Man Who Said No 1983 directed by Gary Conklin nbsp In 2001 Vanity Fair published an article by Vidal on Timothy McVeigh The article attempts to understand why McVeigh perpetrated the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing 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 1990 91 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 that the U S Army had mistreated the Iraqis In concluding the Vanity Fair article Vidal refers to McVeigh as an unlikely sole mover and theorizes that foreign domestic conspiracies could have been involved 55 Vidal was very much against any kind of military intervention in the world 56 In Dreaming War Blood for Oil and the Cheney Bush Junta 2002 Vidal drew parallels about how the United States enters wars and said that President Franklin D Roosevelt provoked Imperial Japan to attack the U S in order to justify the American entry to the Second World War 1939 45 He contended that Roosevelt had advance knowledge of the dawn raid attack on Pearl Harbor December 7 1941 57 In the documentary Why We Fight 2005 Vidal said that during the final months of the war the Japanese had tried to surrender They were trying to surrender all that summer but Truman wouldn t listen because Truman wanted to drop the bombs To show off To frighten Stalin To change the balance of power in the world To declare war on communism Perhaps we were starting a pre emptive world war 58 Criticism of George W Bush edit nbsp Vidal and ex senator George McGovern at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum August 26 2009As a public intellectual Vidal criticized what he viewed as political harm to the nation and the voiding of the citizen s rights through the passage of the USA Patriot Act 2001 during the George W Bush administration 2001 2009 He described Bush as the stupidest man in the United States and said that Bush s foreign policy was explicitly expansionist 59 60 He contended that the Bush Administration and their oil business sponsors aimed to control the petroleum of Central Asia after having gained hegemony over the petroleum of the Persian Gulf in 1991 61 Vidal became a member of the board of advisors of The World Can t Wait a political organization which sought to publicly repudiate the foreign policy program of the Bush Administration 2001 2009 and advocated Bush s impeachment for war crimes such as the Second Iraq War 2003 2011 and torturing prisoners of war soldiers guerrillas civilians in violation of international law 62 In May 2007 while discussing 9 11 conspiracy theories that might explain the who and the why of the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington D C Vidal said I m not a conspiracy theorist I m a conspiracy analyst Everything the Bushites touch is screwed up They could never have pulled off 9 11 even if they wanted to Even if they longed to They could step aside though or just go out to lunch while these terrible things were happening to the nation I believe that of them 63 Political philosophy edit nbsp Vidal ca 1978In the American Conservative article My Pen Pal Gore Vidal 2012 Bill Kauffman reported that Vidal s favorite American politician during his lifetime was Huey Long 1893 1935 the populist Governor 1928 32 and Senator 1932 35 from Louisiana who also had perceived the essential one party nature of U S politics and who was assassinated by a lone gunman called Carl Weiss 64 Despite that Vidal said I think of myself as a conservative with a proprietary attitude towards 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 65 66 Based upon that background of populism from 1970 to 1972 Vidal was a chairman of the People s Party of the United States 67 In 1971 he endorsed the consumer rights advocate Ralph Nader for U S president in the 1972 election 68 In 2007 he endorsed Democrat Dennis Kucinich in his candidacy for the U S presidency in 2008 because Kucinich was the most eloquent of the lot of presidential candidates from either the Republican or the Democratic parties and that Kucinich was very much a favorite out there in the amber fields of grain 69 In a September 30 2009 interview with The Times of London Vidal said that 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 is rotting away and to not expect Barack Obama to save the country and the nation from imperial decay In this interview he also updated his views of his life the United States and other political subjects 70 Vidal had earlier described what he saw as the political and cultural rot in the United States 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 71 Feuds editThe Capote Vidal feud edit In 1975 Vidal sued Truman Capote for slander over the accusation that he had once been thrown out of the White House for being drunk putting his arm around First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy and then insulting her mother 40 Said Capote of Vidal at the time I m always sad about Gore very sad that he has to breathe every day 72 Mutual friend George Plimpton observed There s no venom like Capote s when he s on the prowl and Gore s too I don t know what division the feud should be in The suit was settled in Vidal s favor when Lee Radziwill refused to testify on Capote s behalf telling columnist Liz Smith Oh Liz what do we care they re just a couple of fags They re disgusting 72 73 The Buckley Vidal feud edit nbsp The feud between Vidal and William F Buckley Jr pictured lasted until the latter s death in 2008 In 1968 the ABC television network hired the liberal Vidal and the conservative William F Buckley Jr as political analysts of the presidential nomination conventions of the Republican and Democratic parties 74 After days of bickering their debates deteriorated to vitriolic ad hominem attacks During a moment of crosstalk while discussing the 1968 Democratic National Convention protests the pair argued about freedom of speech namely the legality of protesters to display a Viet Cong flag in America Vidal snapped at Buckley to shut up a minute Moments later the following exchange transpired BUCKLEY Some people were pro Nazi and the answer is that they were well treated by people who ostracized them And I m for ostracizing people who egg on other people to shoot American Marines and American soldiers VIDAL As far as I m concerned the only sort of pro or crypto Nazi I can think of is yourself Failing that I would only say that we can t have BUCKLEY Now listen you queer stop calling me a crypto Nazi or I ll sock you in your goddamn face and you ll stay plastered ABC s Howard K Smith intervened and the debate resumed without violence 54 75 Later Buckley said he regretted having called Vidal a queer but still expressed some distaste for Vidal when he said that he was an evangelist for bisexuality 76 In 1969 in Esquire magazine Buckley continued his cultural feud with Vidal in the essay On Experiencing Gore Vidal August 1969 in which he portrayed Vidal as an apologist for homosexuality Buckley said The man who in his essays proclaims the normalcy of his affliction i e homosexuality and in his art the desirability of it is not to be confused with the man who bears his sorrow quietly The addict is to be pitied and even respected not the pusher The essay is collected in The Governor Listeth A Book of Inspired Political Revelations 1970 an anthology of Buckley s writings from the time 77 Vidal riposted in Esquire with the September 1969 essay A Distasteful Encounter with William F Buckley Jr and said that Buckley was anti black anti semitic and a warmonger 78 Buckley sued Vidal for libel 79 The feud continued in Esquire where Vidal implied that in 1944 Buckley and unnamed siblings had vandalized a Protestant church in Sharon Connecticut the Buckley family hometown after the wife of a pastor had sold a house to a Jewish family Additionally Vidal later claimed to know for a fact that Buckley was rather infatuated with him Buckley again sued Vidal and Esquire for libel and Vidal filed a counterclaim for libel against Buckley citing Buckley s characterization of Myra Breckinridge 1968 as a pornographic novel 80 81 The court dismissed Vidal s counterclaim 82 Buckley accepted a money settlement of 115 000 to pay the fee of his attorney and an editorial apology from Esquire in which the publisher and the editors said that they were utterly convinced of the untruthfulness of Vidal s assertions 83 In a letter to Newsweek magazine the publisher of Esquire said that the settlement of Buckley s suit against us was not a disavowal of Vidal s article On the contrary it clearly states that we published that article because we believed that Vidal had a right to assert his opinions even though we did not share them 84 In Gore Vidal A Biography 1999 Fred Kaplan said that The court had not sustained Buckley s case against Esquire that the court had not ruled that Vidal s article was defamatory It had ruled that the case would have to go to trial in order to determine as a matter of fact whether or not it was defamatory The cash value of the settlement with Esquire represented only Buckley s legal expenses 84 In 2003 Buckley resumed his complaint of having been libeled by Vidal this time with the publication of the anthology Esquire s Big Book of Great Writing 2003 which included Vidal s essay A Distasteful Encounter with William F Buckley Jr Again the offended Buckley filed lawsuit for libel and Esquire magazine again settled Buckley s claim with 55 000 65 000 for the fees of his attorney and 10 000 for personal damages suffered by Buckley 85 In the obituary RIP WFB in Hell March 20 2008 Vidal remembered Buckley who had died on February 27 2008 86 Later in the interview Literary Lion Questions for Gore Vidal June 15 2008 New York Times reporter Deborah Solomon asked Vidal How did you feel when you heard that Buckley died this year Vidal responded 87 I thought hell is bound to be a livelier place as he joins forever those whom he served in life applauding their prejudices and fanning their hatred The Mailer Vidal feud edit On December 15 1971 during the recording of The Dick Cavett Show with Janet Flanner Norman Mailer allegedly head butted Vidal when they were backstage 88 When a reporter asked Vidal why Mailer had knocked heads with him Vidal said Once again words failed Norman Mailer 89 During the recording of the talk show Vidal and Mailer insulted each other over what Vidal had written about him prompting Mailer to say I ve had to smell your works from time to time Apparently Mailer s umbrage resulted from Vidal s reference to Mailer having stabbed his wife of the time 90 Views editPolanski rape case edit Further information Roman Polanski sexual abuse case 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 Switzerland in September 2009 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 thirteen year old girl in Hollywood 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 for elaboration Vidal explained the cultural temper of the U S and of the Hollywood movie business in the 1970s 91 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 2009 from what it was then 1970s 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 91 In response to Vidal s opinion about the decades old Polanski rape 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 psychological wounds of the victims of sexual abuse 92 Scientology edit In 1997 Vidal was one of thirty four 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 93 Scientologists are free to operate in Germany the Church of Scientology however is not recognized as a religious body but as a business with political goals and thus monitored by the German domestic intelligence service 94 95 Despite signing the letter Vidal was critical of Scientology as a religion 96 Sexuality edit In 1967 Vidal appeared in the CBS documentary CBS Reports The Homosexuals in which he expressed his views on homosexuality in the arts 97 Commenting on his life s work and his life he described his style as Knowing who you are what you want to say and not giving a damn 30 Vidal often rebutted the label of gay He maintained that it referred to sexual acts rather than sexuality Gore did not express a public stance on the HIV AIDS crisis According to Vidal s close friend Jay Parini Gore didn t think of himself as a gay guy It makes him self hating How could he despise gays as much as he did In my company he always used the term fags He was uncomfortable with being gay Then again he was wildly courageous Biographer Fred Kaplan concluded He was not interested in making a difference for gay people or being an advocate for gay rights There was no such thing as straight or gay for him just the body and sex 98 In the September 1969 edition of Esquire Vidal wrote 78 30 We are all bisexual to begin with That is a fact of our condition And we are all responsive to sexual stimuli from our own as well as from the opposite sex Certain societies at certain times usually in the interest of maintaining the baby supply have discouraged homosexuality Other societies particularly militaristic ones have exalted it But regardless of tribal taboos homosexuality is a constant fact of the human condition and it is not a sickness not a sin not a crime despite the best efforts of our puritan tribe to make it all three Homosexuality is as natural as heterosexuality Notice I use the word natural not normal Personal life edit nbsp Vidal as a young manIn the multi volume memoir The Diary of Anais Nin 1931 74 Anais Nin said she had a love affair with Vidal who denied her claim in his memoir Palimpsest 1995 In the online article Gore Vidal s Secret Unpublished Love Letter to Anais Nin 2013 author Kim Krizan said she found an unpublished love letter from Vidal to Nin which contradicts his denial of a love affair with Nin Krizan said she found the love letter while researching Mirages the latest volume of Nin s uncensored diary to which Krizan wrote the foreword 99 Vidal would cruise the streets and bars of New York City and other locales and wrote in his memoir that by age twenty five he had had more than a thousand sexual encounters 100 Vidal also said that he had an intermittent romance with the actress Diana Lynn and alluded to possibly having fathered a daughter 6 290 101 He was briefly engaged to the actress Joanne Woodward before she married the actor Paul Newman after marrying they briefly shared a house with Vidal in Los Angeles 102 Vidal enjoyed telling his sexual exploits to friends Vidal claimed to have slept with Fred Astaire when he first moved to Hollywood and also with a young Dennis Hopper 98 In 1950 Vidal met Howard Austen who became his partner for the next 53 years until Austen s death 103 He said that the secret to his long relationship with Austen was that they did not have sex with each other It s easy to sustain a relationship when sex plays no part and impossible I have observed when it does 104 In Celebrity The Advocate Interviews 1995 by Judy Wiedner Vidal said that he refused to call himself gay because he was not an adjective adding to be categorized is simply to be enslaved Watch out I have never thought of myself as a victim I ve said a thousand times in print and on TV that everyone is bisexual 105 In the course of his life Vidal lived at various times in Italy and in the United States In 2003 as his health began to fail with age he sold his Italian villa La Rondinaia The Swallow s Nest on the Amalfi Coast in the province of Salerno and he and Austen returned to live in their 1929 106 villa in Outpost Estates Los Angeles 107 Howard Austen died in November 2003 and in February 2005 his remains were re buried at Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington D C in a joint grave plot that Vidal had purchased for himself and Austen 108 Death edit nbsp The grave of Gore Vidal in Rock Creek Cemetery In 2010 Vidal began to suffer from Wernicke Korsakoff syndrome a neurological disorder caused by his years of alcohol abuse 109 On July 31 2012 Vidal died of pneumonia at his home in the Hollywood Hills at the age of 86 109 110 111 A memorial service was held for him at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre in New York City on August 23 2012 112 He was buried next to Howard Austen in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington D C 113 Vidal said he chose his grave site 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 114 Upon his death Vidal bequeathed the entirety of his estate valued at 37 million 115 to Harvard University 116 Legacy editPostmortem opinions and assessments of Vidal as a writer varied The New York Times described him as 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 117 The Los Angeles Times said that he was a literary juggernaut whose novels and essays were considered among the most elegant in the English language 118 The Washington Post described him as a major writer of the modern era an astonishingly versatile man of letters 119 The Guardian said that 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 120 The Daily Telegraph described the writer as an icy iconoclast who delighted in chronicling what he perceived as the disintegration of civilisation around him 121 The BBC News said that 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 122 In The Culture of the United States Laments the Death of Gore Vidal the Spanish on line magazine Ideal said that Vidal s death was a loss to the culture of the United States and described him as a great American novelist and essayist 123 In The Writer Gore Vidal is Dead in Los Angeles the online edition of the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera described the novelist as the enfant terrible of American culture and that he was one of the giants of American literature 124 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 125 On August 23 2012 in the program a Memorial for Gore Vidal in Manhattan the life and works of the writer Gore Vidal 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 was host of the Vidalian celebration which featured personal reminiscences about and performances of excerpts from the works of Vidal 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 126 In the 1960s Vidal selected the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research at the University of Wisconsin to archive his papers given his early focus on film In 2002 Vidal transferred his papers to Houghton Library at Harvard University where they are housed to this day 127 In popular culture edit In the 1960s the weekly American sketch comedy television program Rowan amp Martin s Laugh In featured a running joke sketch about Vidal the telephone operator Ernestine Lily Tomlin would call him saying Mr Veedul this is the Phone Company calling snort snort 128 129 The sketch titled Mr Veedle also appeared in Tomlin s comedy record album This Is a Recording 1972 130 Vidal provided his own voice for the animated cartoon version of himself in The Simpsons episode Moe N a Lisa 131 He also voiced his animated cartoon version in Family Guy 132 He was interviewed in the Da Ali G Show the Ali G character mistakes him for Vidal Sassoon a famous hairdresser 133 The Buckley Vidal debates their aftermath and cultural significance were the focus of a 2015 documentary film called Best of Enemies as well as a 2021 play by James Graham inspired by the film 134 135 In season eight episode eight of The Office titled 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 A Netflix biopic titled Gore was filmed in 2017 It was directed and co written by Michael Hoffman and based on Jay Parini s book Empire of Self A Life of Gore Vidal The film which starred Kevin Spacey in the title role was cancelled and remains unreleased due to sexual misconduct allegations made against Spacey 136 137 Selected list of works editMain article List of works by Gore Vidal The City and the Pillar 1948 The Best Man 1960 Julian 1964 Myra Breckinridge 1968 Burr 1973 Lincoln 1984 Filmography edit Year Title Role Notes1972 Roma Himself Uncredited1992 Bob Roberts Senator Brikley Paiste1994 With Honors Pitkannen1997 Shadow Conspiracy Congressman PageGattaca Director Josef2002 Igby Goes Down First School Headmaster Uncredited2009 Shrink George CharlesSee also editList of Venice Film Festival jury presidents Politics in fictionReferences edit Vidal Gore April 1 2013 I Told You So Gore Vidal Talks Politics Interviews with Jon Wiener Catapult pp 54 55 ISBN 978 1 61902 212 6 Murphy Bruce Benet s Reader s Encyclopedia 4th ed HarperCollins Publishers 1996 p 1080 Terry C V New York Times Book Review The City and the Pillar January 11 1948 p 22 Hornblower Simon amp Spawforth Editors The Oxford Companion to Classical Civilization Oxford University Press 1998 pp 383 384 a b Kiernan Robert F 1982 Gore Vidal Frederick Ungar Publishing ISBN 9780804424615 Retrieved February 16 2020 a b c d e f Vidal Gore 1995 Palimpsest A Memoir New York Random House ISBN 9780679440383 Retrieved February 16 2020 Vidal Gore West Point and the Third Loyalty Archived July 15 2014 at the Wayback Machine The New York Review of Books Volume 20 Number 16 October 18 1973 Gore Vidal Author Biography Essays History Novels Style Favorite Books Interview 2000 August 25 2013 Archived from the original on August 27 2013 via YouTube a b Kaplan Fred 1999 Excerpt Gore Vidal A Biography The New York Times Archived from the original on May 10 2013 Retrieved June 12 2013 a b c Peabody Richard Ebersole Lucinda February 2005 Conversations with Gore Vidal Paper ed Oxford University Press of Mississippi ISBN 9781578066735 Retrieved February 16 2020 Aeronautics 8 073 61 Time September 28 1931 Booknotes East to the Dawn The Life of Amelia Earhart C SPAN November 13 1997 Retrieved November 14 2021 Eugene L Vidal Aviation Leader The New York Times February 21 1969 p 43 Archived from the original on July 23 2018 Retrieved July 23 2018 South Dakota Sports Hall of Fame Profile Gene Vidal Archived October 16 2007 at the Wayback Machine Parini Jay 2015 Empire of Self A Life of Gore Vidal Archived June 13 2020 at the Wayback Machine New York Penguin Random House ISBN 978 0 385 53757 5 Retrieved December 23 2015 General Robert Olds Marries New York Times June 7 1942 p 6 dead link Miss Nina Gore Marries The New York Times January 12 1922 Archived from the original on June 10 2020 Retrieved June 10 2020 Vidal Gore Point to Point Navigation New York Doubleday 2006 p 135 Politicians Aubertine to Austern The Political Graveyard 2008 Archived from the original on December 28 2008 Retrieved October 31 2008 Maj Gen Olds 46 of Air Force Dies The New York Times April 29 1943 Archived from the original on June 10 2020 Retrieved June 10 2020 Hugh Steers 32 Figurative Painter The New York Times March 4 1995 Archived from the original on April 17 2017 Retrieved February 8 2017 Durbin Karen September 15 2002 A Family s Legacy Pain and Humor and a Movie The New York Times Archived from the original on April 21 2017 Retrieved February 8 2017 Rutten Tim The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal Archived October 4 2008 at the Wayback Machine Los Angeles Times June 18 2008 Jay Parini Every time a friend succeeds something inside me dies The Life of Gore Vidal London Little Brown 2015 pp 27 28 Gore Vidal A Critical Companion Susan Baker Curtis S Gibson Greenwood Publishing Group 1997 ISBN 0 313 29579 4 p 3 Vidal Gore Williwaw Preface p 1 Clarke Interviewed by Gerald 1974 Paris Review The Art of Fiction No 50 Gore Vidal The Paris Review Vol Fall 1974 no 59 Archived from the original on October 28 2010 Retrieved November 29 2010 Bloom Harold 1994 The Western Canon The Books and School of the Ages Riverhead Books p 21 ISBN 978 1 57322 514 4 Archived from the original on September 19 2015 Retrieved August 1 2012 Vidal Gore The City and the Pillar and Seven Early Stories NY Random House p xiii a b c d e f Duke Barry August 1 2012 Farewell Gore Vidal Gay Atheist Extraordinary Freethinker co uk Archived from the original on January 8 2018 Retrieved December 18 2015 Roberts James The Legacy of Jimmy Trimble Archived November 5 2012 at the Wayback Machine ESPN March 14 2002 Chalmers Robert Gore Vidal Literary feuds his vicious mother and rumours of a secret love child Archived June 14 2012 at the Wayback Machine The Independent May 25 2008 Vidal Gore Point to Point Navigation New York Doubleday 2006 245 Decoration de l ecrivain Gore Vidal Archived October 13 2008 at the Wayback Machine The Boston Globe Diane White Murder He Wrote Before Becoming a Man of Letters 25 March 2011 Retrieved July 11 2011 Archived November 27 2011 at the Wayback Machine Vidal Gore Introduction to Death in the Fifth Position in Edgar Box Death in the Fifth Position Vintage 2011 pp 5 6 Philco Television Playhouse A Sense of Justice TV The Paley Center for Media Archived from the original on August 26 2014 Retrieved January 1 2013 Bayard Louis April 12 2015 Review Gore Vidal s Thieves Fall Out Where Pulp Fiction and Hard Reality Met The New York Times archived from the original on April 13 2015 retrieved April 12 2015 Leonard John July 7 1970 Not Enough Blood Not Enough Gore The New York Times Archived from the original on April 10 2009 Retrieved October 30 2008 a b Gore Vidal Dies at 86 Prolific Elegant Acerbic Writer The New York Times August 1 2012 Archived from the original on January 28 2017 Retrieved February 8 2017 Solomon Deborah June 15 2008 Literary Lion The New York Times Magazine Archived from the original on December 10 2008 Retrieved June 29 2008 National Book Awards 1993 Archived October 29 2018 at the Wayback Machine National Book Foundation Retrieved 2012 03 12 With acceptance speech by Vidal read by Harry Evans Distinguished Contribution to American Letters Archived March 10 2011 at the Wayback Machine National Book Foundation Retrieved 2012 03 11 With acceptance speech by Vidal and official blurb Gore Vidal The Death of a Legend American Atheists Atheists org August 1 2012 Archived from the original on August 4 2012 Retrieved August 5 2012 Mick LaSalle October 2 1995 A Commanding Presence Actor Charlton Heston Sets His Epic Career in Stone or At Least on Paper The San Francisco Chronicle p E1 Ned Rorem December 12 1999 Gore Vidal Aloof in Art and Life Chicago Sun Times p 18S Show Business Will the Real Caligula Stand Up Archived October 22 2010 at the Wayback Machine Time January 3 1977 a b Vidal Gore 2014 The History of the National Security State CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform p 6 Gore Vidal The Nation Archived from the original on January 16 2009 Retrieved January 22 2009 Ira Henry Freeman Gore Vidal Conducts Campaign of Quips and Liberal Views Archived June 29 2016 at the Wayback Machine The New York Times September 15 1960 Statistics of the Presidential and Congressional Election of November 8 1960 PDF Office of the Clerk U S House of Representatives 1960 p 31 item 29 Archived PDF from the original on October 21 2011 Retrieved August 4 2012 1960 U S Presidential Election Results by Congressional District Western Washington University Freeman Ira Henry September 15 1960 The Playwright the Lawyer and the Voters The New York Times p 20 Archived from the original on July 23 2018 Retrieved July 23 2018 a b Archived from gorevidalnow com in which Gore Vidal corrects his Wikipedia page Gore Vidal The Meaning of Timothy McVeigh Archived May 30 2010 at the Wayback Machine Vanity Fair September 2001 Jackson Webb Fron August 2012 Reflections on the life and work of Gore Vidal The Conversation Archived from the original on May 6 2019 Retrieved May 6 2019 Gore Vidal Three Lies to Rule By and Japanese Intentions in the Second World War from Dreaming War Blood for Oil and the Cheney Bush Junta New York 2002 ISBN 1 56025 502 1 Why We Fight 9 of 48 Say2 org Series of Subtitles for Documentary Video Archived from the original on July 28 2011 Retrieved November 7 2011 Osborne Kevin Obama a Disappointment City Beat Archived from the original on May 26 2010 Retrieved June 2 2010 YouTube The Henry Rollins Show The Corruption of Election 2008 January 12 2008 Archived from the original on November 14 2008 Retrieved October 20 2008 via YouTube Gore Vidal Interview with Alex Jones Infowars 29 October 2006 Texas Book Fest November 1 2006 Archived from the original on May 19 2011 Retrieved January 22 2009 World Can t Wait Advisory Board Archived from the original on April 26 2006 Retrieved July 29 2002 Close May 5 2007 Vidal salon The Guardian London Archived from the original on December 20 2013 Retrieved August 17 2009 Kauffman Bill September 14 2012 My Pen Pal Gore Vidal Archived March 28 2019 at the Wayback Machine The American Conservative Real Time With Bill Maher Season 7 Episode 149 April 10 2009 Gore Vidal Sexually Speaking Collected Sexual Writings Cleis Press 1999 Gore Vidal Wtp org Archived from the original on July 8 2008 Retrieved October 20 2008 Vidal Gore The Best Man 72 Archived January 5 2010 at the Wayback Machine Esquire Dennis Kucinich The Nation November 8 2007 Archived from the original on August 4 2012 Retrieved March 25 2012 Interview Archived November 10 2013 at the Wayback Machine The Times September 30 2009 Gore Vidal 1977 Matters of Fact and of Fiction Essays 1973 76 Random House pp 265 85 ISBN 0 394 41128 5 a b Sued by Gore Vidal and Stung by Lee Radziwill a Wounded Truman Capote Lashes Back at the Dastardly Duo Archived from the original on June 14 2015 Retrieved April 9 2015 Maer Roshan April 8 2015 At 92 Liz Smith Reveals How Rupert Murdoch Fired Her What It Felt Like to Be Outed The Hollywood Reporter Archived from the original on April 9 2015 Retrieved April 9 2015 Kloman Harry Political Animals Vidal Buckley and the 68 Conventions University of Pittsburgh Archived from the original on September 21 2009 Retrieved November 2 2009 William Buckley Gore Vidal Debate Archived from the original on January 11 2021 Retrieved August 3 2012 via YouTube Feuds Wasted Talent Time August 22 1969 Archived from the original on November 27 2011 Retrieved November 7 2011 Buckley William F 1970 The governor listeth a book of inspired political revelations New York Putnam LCCN 70 105581 a b Gore Vidal September 1969 A Distasteful Encounter with William F Buckley Jr Esquire p 140 Vidal Is Sued by Buckley A Nazi Libel Is Charged The New York Times May 7 1969 Archived from the original on July 16 2020 Retrieved April 29 2019 Buckley v Vidal 327 F Supp 1051 US S D N Y 13 May 1971 in August 1968 Buckley made the following statement Let Myra Breckinridge referring to the novel bearing such name and thereby identifying its author Gore Vidal with such novel go back to his pornography Athitakis Mark February 23 2018 Saluting Myra Breckinridge on its 50th anniversary Los Angeles Times Archived from the original on April 1 2018 Retrieved March 31 2018 Buckley v Vidal Archived January 11 2021 at the Wayback Machine 327 F Supp 1051 1971 Buckley Drops Vidal Suit Settles With Esquire The New York Times September 26 1972 p 40 a b Kaplan Fred 1999 Gore Vidal A Biography New York Doubleday ISBN 9780385477031 Archived from the original on January 11 2021 Retrieved October 8 2020 Kloman Harry Political Animals Vidal Buckley and the 68 Conventions University of Pittsburgh Archived from the original on November 17 2016 Retrieved December 28 2016 Reports Gore Vidal Speaks Seriously Ill of the Dead Truthdig March 20 2008 Archived from the original on December 4 2008 Retrieved January 22 2009 Solomon Deborah Literary Lion Questions for Gore Vidal Archived February 6 2017 at the Wayback Machine New York Times 15 June 2008 Veitch Jonathan May 24 1998 Raging Bull THE TIME OF OUR TIME By Norman Mailer Los Angeles Times Archived from the original on July 25 2012 Retrieved November 7 2011 Cavett Dick January 23 2003 Cavett Gore Vidal Hates Being Dead CNN Archived from the original on August 7 2012 The Guest From Hell Savoring Norman Mailer s Legendary Appearance on The Dick Cavett Show Slate August 2 2007 Archived from the original on August 2 2012 Retrieved April 13 2012 a b John Meroney October 28 2009 A Conversation With Gore Vidal The Atlantic Archived from the original on January 4 2015 Retrieved March 7 2017 Gore Vidal rips Roman Polanski rape victim as hooker Boston Herald November 1 2009 Archived from the original on December 28 2014 Retrieved January 10 2015 Drozdiak William January 14 1997 U S Celebrities Defend Scientology in Germany Archived July 24 2013 at the Wayback Machine The Washington Post p A 11 Barber Tony January 30 1997 Germany is harassing Scientologists says US The Independent retrieved September 11 2009 Kent Stephen A January 2001 The French and German versus American Debate over New Religions Scientology and Human Rights PDF Marburg Journal of Religion 6 1 retrieved June 17 2009 Baker Russ April 1997 Clash of the Titans Scientology vs Germany George magazine CBS Mike Wallace March 3 1967 The Homosexuals Television Archived from the original on April 13 2014 Retrieved March 13 2016 a b Teeman Tim July 31 2013 How Gay Was Gore Vidal The Daily Beast Archived from the original on September 27 2020 Retrieved July 14 2020 Krizan Kim September 27 2013 Gore Vidal s Secret Unpublished Love Letter to Anais Nin HuffPost Archived from the original on September 27 2013 Retrieved September 20 2013 Vidal Gore 1995 Palimpsest A Memoir p 121 Joy Do Lico and Andrew Johnson The Rumours About My Love Child May Be True says Gore Vidal The Independent May 25 2008 Balaban Judy January 22 2013 The Gore They Loved Vanity Fair Archived from the original on April 25 2017 Retrieved December 28 2016 What I ve Learned Esquire magazine June 2008 p 132 Robinson Charlotte Outtake Blog Author amp Gay Icon Gore Vidal Dies Outtake Blog Archived from the original on August 4 2012 Retrieved August 1 2012 Wieder Judy 2001 Wieder Judy ed Celebrity The Advocate Interviews New York City New York Advocate Books p 127 ISBN 1 55583 722 0 Longtime Hollywood Hills estate of late writer Gore Vidal is for sale Archived July 27 2019 at the Wayback Machine in LA Times on 18 November 2015 Time International September 28 1992 described the 5000 ft 2 460 m2 property as a massive villa in every detail of location and layout designed to enhance concentration p 44 Wilson Scott Resting Places The Burial Sites of More Than 14 000 Famous Persons 3d ed 2 Kindle Locations 48809 48810 McFarland amp Company Inc Publishers Kindle Edition a b Robson Leo October 26 2015 Delusions of Candour The New Yorker Archived from the original on December 22 2015 Retrieved December 9 2015 Gore Vidal Celebrated Author Playwright Dies Archived February 29 2016 at the Wayback Machine by Tina Fineberg USA Today August 1 2012 Hillel Italie and Andrew Dalton Gore Vidal celebrated author playwright dies Archived November 10 2012 at the Wayback Machine Associated Press August 1 2012 Memorial for Gore Vidal in Manhattan The New York Times August 23 2012 Gore Vidal s Grave Huffington Post August 1 2012 Gore Vidal Oct 3 1925 July 31 2012 sites pitt edu Retrieved October 7 2023 Teeman Tim November 8 2013 For Gore Vidal a Final Plot Twist The New York Times ISSN 0362 4331 Retrieved July 5 2023 Gore Vidal s Multimillion Dollar Gift to the University Challenged by Half Sister News The Harvard Crimson www thecrimson com Retrieved July 5 2023 Charles McGrath August 1 2012 Prolific Elegant Acerbic Writer The New York Times Archived from the original on August 1 2012 Retrieved August 1 2012 Elaine Woo August 1 2012 Gore Vidal Iconoclastic Author Dies at 86 Los Angeles Times Archived from the original on August 1 2012 Retrieved August 1 2012 Michael Dirda August 1 2012 Gore Vidal Dies imperious gadfly and prolific graceful writer was 86 The Washington Post Archived from the original on September 14 2014 Retrieved August 1 2012 Jay Parini August 1 2012 Gore Vidal Obituary The Guardian London Archived from the original on November 4 2013 Retrieved August 5 2012 Gore Vidal The Daily Telegraph London August 1 2012 Archived from the original on August 5 2012 Retrieved August 5 2012 Alastair Leithead August 1 2012 Obituary Gore Vidal BBC Archived from the original on August 4 2012 Retrieved August 5 2012 La cultura de Estados Unidos lamenta la muerte de Gore Vidal Ideal es August 2012 Archived from the original on October 17 2012 Retrieved August 2 2012 Redazione online Los Angeles e morto lo scrittore Gore Vidal Corriere della Sera Archived from the original on August 2 2012 Retrieved August 2 2012 Gore Vidal le trouble fete de l Amerique Gore Vidal The Killjoy of America Le Figaro in French January 8 2012 Archived from the original on August 1 2012 Retrieved August 2 2012 McGrath Charles August 23 2012 Vidal s Own Wit to Celebrate Him The New York Times Archived from the original on June 30 2013 Retrieved June 10 2013 Gore Vidal donates papers to Houghton Harvard Gazette February 14 2002 Retrieved July 5 2023 StarNewsOnline com blog On Rowan amp Martin s Laugh In Lily Tomlin as Ernestine the telephone operator would often call Mr Veedle Archived May 15 2013 at the Wayback Machine Ernestine the Operator TV Acres 1 Lily Tomlin as Ernestine the Telephone Operator a conversation with writer Gore Vidal as Ernestine says Mr Veedle you owe us Record album This is a Recording by Lily Tomlin title Mr Veedle Archived January 9 2015 at the Wayback Machine Rhapsody The Simpsons TV Series Moe N a Lisa 2006 Full Cast amp Crew IMDb Retrieved January 19 2023 Family Guy TV Series Mother Tucker 2006 Full Cast amp Crew IMDb Retrieved January 19 2023 Da Ali G Show Gore Vidal YouTube Retrieved January 19 2023 Grynbaum Michael M July 24 2015 Buckley vs Vidal When Debate Became Bloodsport The New York Times Archived from the original on August 21 2020 Retrieved July 14 2020 Best Of Enemies Young Vic Retrieved May 12 2021 Stanhope Kate McClintock Pamela November 3 2017 Netflix severs ties with Kevin Spacey drops Gore movie The Hollywood Reporter Los Angeles California Eldridge Industries Retrieved November 4 2017 Oldham Stuart November 3 2017 Kevin Spacey Suspended From House of Cards Variety Los Angeles California Penske Media Corporation Retrieved November 4 2017 External links editGore Vidal at Wikipedia s sister projects nbsp Media from Commons nbsp Quotations from Wikiquote nbsp Texts from Wikisource nbsp Data from Wikidata Gore Vidal Index by Harry Kloman Gore Vidal Pages Gore Vidal at IMDb Gore Vidal at the Internet Broadway Database nbsp Gore Vidal at the Internet Off Broadway Database Gore Vidal at AllMovie Appearances on C SPAN Documentary Gore Vidal The United States of Amnesia Film web site At Internet Movie Database Interview with Director Nicholas Wrathall Gore Vidal Obituary New York Times Gore Vidal Biography and Interview with American Academy of Achievement Gore Vidal on Encyclopedia Britannica Gore Vidal on The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Gore Vidal on Open Library Internet Archive Gore Vidal and Dennis Altman Speaking About Gore Vidal s America on 11 07 05 at D G Wills Books in La Jolla CA 86 min in mp3 format Gore Vidal on Goodreads Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Gore Vidal amp oldid 1192540506, wikipedia, wiki, book, 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