Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal is a novelist, essayist, playwright, and provocateur whose career has spanned six decades, beginning in the years immediately following World War II and continuing into the early years of the twenty-first century. In addition to a major sequence of seven novels about American history, and such satirical novels as MYRA BRECKINRIDGE and DULUTH, he has written dozens of television plays, film scripts, and even three mystery novels written under a pseudonym. He has also written well over a hundred essays, gathered in several volumes published between 1962 and 2001.

Taken as a whole, this seemingly varied work has an uncanny unity, exhibiting a tone of easy familiarity with the world of politics and letters, an urbane wit, and a supreme self-confidence on the part of the writer. Vidal's lineage in American literature may be traced back to Henry James, the sophisticated American from the upper echelons of society who mingles with European sophisticates, and Mark Twain, the raw humorist and critic of American empire.


Vidal was born in 1925 with high political and social connections. His father, Eugene Luther Vidal, worked for the Roosevelt administration as Director of Air Commerce from 1933 until 1937. His maternal grandfather was Senator Thomas Prior Gore of Oklahoma, a Democrat who played an important role in Democratic politics for many decades. Gore Vidal's mother, Nina Gore Vidal, was divorced in 1935, when Vidal was ten. She then married Hugh D. Auchincloss, a wealthy financier, who in turn divorced her and married Jacqueline Kennedy's mother, thus establishing a connection between Vidal and the Kennedy clan that persisted through the presidency of John F. Kennedy.

In 1943, after graduating from Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, he entered the Reserve Corps of the U.S. Army. After a brief training period at the Virginia Military Institute, he joined the Army Transportation Corps as an officer and was sent to the Aleutian Islands. He wrote much of his first novel, WILLIWAW, during a run between Chernowski Bay and Dutch Harbor. Suffering from serious frostbite and arthritis, he was sent back to the States, where he finished the novel while recuperating in a military hospital.

In its tight-lipped, minimalist style, WILLIWAW reflects Vidal's reading of Hemingway and Stephen Crane. For a writer barely out of his teens, the book was an extraordinary achievement. It seemed absolutely authentic and put Vidal on the map of young postwar novelists that included Norman Mailer, John Horne Burns, and Truman Capote.