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PALIMPSEST

Gore Vidal was born in 1925 at the United States Military Academy, West Point, where his father, Eugene Vidal, was the first aviation instructor. Vidal’s roots were thoroughly political. As a boy, he lived with and acted as page to his maternal grandfather, the legendary blind Senator Thomas P. Gore of Oklahoma, accompanying him to the Senate floor and reading to him. His father served as director of the Bureau of Air Commerce under Franklin D. Roosevelt. After graduating from Phillips Exeter Academy, Vidal enlisted at seventeen in the United States Army and served in World War II. His experiences in the war provided him with the material for his first novel, the critically acclaimed Williwaw (1946).

Vidal’s early works include The City and the Pillar (1948), the short story collection A Thirsty Evil (1956), and two successful Broadway plays, Visit to a Small Planet (1957) and the prize-winning The Best Man (1960). Vidal also wrote a number of plays for television’s “golden age” (The Death of Billy the Kid) as well as Hollywood screenplays (Suddenly, Last Summer). In the sixties, three widely acclaimed novels established Vidal’s international reputation as a bestselling author: Julian (1964), a re-creation of the world of the apostate Roman emperor who attempted to restore paganism; Washington, D.C. (1967), the first in what was to become a multivolume fictional “chronicle” of American history; and the classic Myra Breckinridge (1968), a comedy of sex change in a highly mythical Hollywood.

Myron (1974), a sequel to Myra Breckinridge, continued to mine the vein of fanciful, sometimes apocalyptic humor that informs Kalki (1978), Duluth (1983), and Live from Golgotha (1992), works described by Italo Calvino as “the hyper-novel or the novel elevated to the square or to the cube.”

He was one of America’s most prolific and respected writers, and Gabriel García Márquez praised “Gore Vidal’s magnificent series of historical novels or novelized histories” that deal with American life as viewed by one family from the Revolution to the present: Burr (1973), Lincoln (1984), 1876 (1976), Empire (1987), Hollywood (1990), Washington, D.C., and The Golden Age (2000). Vidal’s interest in politics was not limited to commentary; he ran for Congress in New York in 1960 and came in second in the California Democratic senatorial primary in 1982.

Vidal’s essays, both political and literary, have been collected in such volumes as Homage to Daniel Shays (1972), Matters of Fact and Fiction (1977), The Second American Revolution (1982), and At Home (1988). In 1993, his United States: Essays 1952–1992 won the National Book Award.

Vidal died in 2012 at his home in California.