Eugene Luther Gore Vidal ( ; born Eugene Louis Vidal, October 3, 1925 – July 31, 2012) was an American writer and public intellectual known for his cynical epigrammatic wit. His novels and essays criticized the social and sexual norms he perceived as driving American life. Vidal was heavily involved in politics, and unsuccessfully sought office twice as a Democratic Party candidate, first in 1960 to the United States House of Representatives (for New York), and later in 1982 to the United States Senate (for California).
A grandson of U.S. Senator Thomas Gore, Vidal was born into an upper-class political family. His political and cultural essays were published in The Nation, the New Statesman, the New York Review of Books, and Esquire magazines. As a public intellectual, Vidal's topical debates on sex, politics, and religion with other intellectuals and writers occasionally turned into quarrels with the likes of William F. Buckley Jr. and Norman Mailer.
As a novelist, Vidal explored the nature of corruption in public and private life. His style of narration evoked the time and place of his stories and delineated his characters' psychology.Murphy, Bruce. Benét's Reader's Encyclopedia (4th ed.). HarperCollins Publishers (1996), p. 1080. His third novel, The City and the Pillar (1948), about a dispassionately presented male homosexual relationship, offended conservative book reviewers' literary, political, and moral sensibilities.Terry, C. V. New York Times Book Review, "The City and the Pillar", January 11, 1948, p. 22.
Vidal's historical novel Julian (1964) recreates the world of Julian the Apostate (r. AD 361–363), the Roman emperor who attempted to reestablish Roman polytheism to counter Christianity.Hornblower, Simon & Spawforth, Editors. The Oxford Companion to Classical Civilization Oxford University Press (1998), pp. 383–384. Myra Breckinridge (1968) is a social satire that explores the mutability of gender roles and sexual orientation as social constructs established by social mores. In Burr (1973) and Lincoln (1984), both part of his Narratives of Empire series of novels, each protagonist is presented as "A Man of the People" and as "A Man" in a narrative exploration of how the public and private facets of personality affect U.S. politics.
Early life Vidal was born in the cadet hospital of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, the only child of Eugene Luther Vidal (1895–1969) and Nina S. Gore (1903–1978).Vidal, Gore, "West Point and the Third Loyalty ", The New York Review of Books, Volume 20, Number 16, October 18, 1973. Vidal was born there because his father, a U.S. Army officer, was then serving as the first aeronautics instructor at the military academy. The middle name, Louis, was a mistake on the part of his father, "who could not remember, for certain, whether his own name was Eugene Louis or Eugene Luther". In his memoir Palimpsest (1995), Vidal wrote, "My birth certificate says 'Eugene Louis Vidal': this was changed to Eugene Luther Vidal Jr.; then Gore was added at my christening in 1939; then, at fourteen, I got rid of the first two names."
Vidal was baptized in January 1939, when he was 13 years old, by the headmaster of St. Albans School, where Vidal attended preparatory school. The baptismal ceremony was effected so he "could be confirmed [into the Episcopal faith]" at the Washington Cathedral, in February 1939, as "Eugene Luther Gore Vidal". He later said that, although the surname "Gore" was added to his names at the time of the baptism, "I wasn't named for him [maternal grandfather Thomas Pryor Gore], although he had a great influence on my life." In 1941, Vidal dropped his two first names, because he "wanted a sharp, distinctive name, appropriate for an aspiring author, or a national political leader ... I wasn't going to write as 'Gene' since there was already one. I didn't want to use the 'Jr.
His father, Eugene Luther Vidal Sr., was director (1933–1937) of the Commerce Department's Bureau of Air Commerce during the Roosevelt Administration and the great love of the aviator Amelia Earhart."Aeronautics: $8,073.61", Time, September 28, 1931 At the U.S. Military Academy, Vidal Sr. had been a quarterback, coach, and captain of the football team and an all-American basketball player. He competed in the 1920 Summer Olympics and the 1924 Summer Olympics (seventh in the decathlon, and coach of the U.S. pentathlon).South Dakota Sports Hall of Fame Profile: Gene Vidal. In the 1920s and the 1930s, Vidal Sr. was a founder or executive of three airline companies: the Ludington Line (later Eastern Airlines), Transcontinental Air Transport (later Trans World Airlines), and Northeast Airlines.
Gore's great-grandfather Eugen Fidel Vidal was born in Feldkirch, Austria, of Romansh background, and came to the U.S. with Gore's Swiss great-grandmother, Emma Hartmann.Parini, Jay (2015). Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal . New York: Penguin Random House. . Retrieved December 23, 2015
Vidal's mother, Nina Gore, was a socialite who made her Broadway theater debut as an extra actress in Sign of the Leopard, in 1928. In 1922, Nina married Eugene Luther Vidal Sr. They divorced in 1935. Nina Gore Vidal married two more times, to Hugh D. Auchincloss and to Robert Olds. She also had "a long off-and-on affair" with the actor Clark Gable.Vidal, Gore. Point to Point Navigation, New York: Doubleday, 2006, p. 135. As Nina Gore Auchincloss, Vidal's mother was an alternate delegate to the 1940 Democratic National Convention.
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 stepbrother, Hugh D. "Yusha" Auchincloss III from his mother's marriage to Hugh D. Auchincloss, and four stepbrothers, including Robin Olds, from her marriage to Robert Olds, a major general in the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF), who died in 1943, 10 months after marrying Nina. Through Auchincloss, Vidal also was the stepbrother once removed of Jacqueline Kennedy. Vidal's nephews include Burr Steers, a writer and film director, and Hugh Auchincloss Steers (1963–1995), a figurative painter.
Raised in Washington, D.C., Vidal attended the Sidwell Friends School and St. Albans School. His maternal grandfather, Senator Thomas Pryor Gore, was blind, and Vidal read aloud to him and was his Senate page and seeing-eye guide.Rutten, Tim. "'The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal' ", Los Angeles Times, June 18, 2008. In 1939, during his summer holiday, Vidal went with some colleagues and a professor from St. Albans School on his first European trip, to Italy and France. He visited Rome, the city that 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 President John F. Kennedy).Jay Parini, Every time a friend succeeds, something inside me dies: The Life of Gore Vidal (London: Little, Brown, 2015), pp. 27–28. ) In 1940, Vidal attended the Los Alamos Ranch School. He later transferred to Phillips Exeter Academy, where he contributed to The Exonian, the school newspaper.Gore Vidal: A Critical Companion, Susan Baker, Curtis S. Gibson. Greenwood Publishing Group, 1997. . p. 3.
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 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' service, Vidal suffered hypothermia, developed rheumatoid arthritis, and was reassigned to duty as a mess officer.Vidal, Gore. Williwaw, "Preface", p. 1.
Literary career Vidal described his literary style as "knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn." The cultural critic Harold Bloom wrote that Vidal believed his sexuality had denied him full recognition from the U.S. literary community. Bloom contended that Vidal's limited recognition was more because his "best fictions" were historical novels, a subgenre "no longer available for canonization".
Fiction
Vidal's literary career began with the success of the military novel Williwaw, a men-at-war story derived from his Alaskan Harbor Detachment duty during World War II.Vidal, Gore. The City and the Pillar and Seven Early Stories (NY: Random House), p. xiii. His third novel, The City and the Pillar (1948), caused a moralistic furor over his dispassionate presentation of a young protagonist coming to terms with his homosexuality. The novel was dedicated to "J. T."; decades later, Vidal confirmed that the initials were those of his boyhood friend and St. Albans classmate James Trimble III, who was killed in the Battle of Iwo Jima on March 1, 1945, and was the only person Vidal ever loved.Roberts, James. "The Legacy of Jimmy Trimble ", ESPN, March 14, 2002.Chalmers, Robert. "Gore Vidal: Literary feuds, his 'vicious' mother and rumours of a secret love child ", The Independent, May 25, 2008. Critics railed against Vidal's presentation of homosexuality in the novel, as it was viewed generally at the time as unnatural and immoral. Vidal said that New York Times critic Orville Prescott was so offended by the book that he refused to review or to permit other critics to review any book by Vidal.Vidal, Gore. Point to Point Navigation (New York: Doubleday, 2006), 245 Vidal said that, upon the book's publication, an editor at E. P. Dutton told him, "You will never be forgiven for this book. Twenty years from now, you will still be attacked for it." Today, Vidal is often seen as an early champion of sexual liberation.Décoration de l'écrivain Gore Vidal.
Under the pseudonym "Edgar Box", Vidal wrote the mystery novels Death in the Fifth Position (1952), Death before Bedtime (1953), and Death Likes it Hot (1954), featuring Peter Cutler Sargeant II, a publicist turned private eye. His satirical novel Messiah, detailing the rise of a new nontheistic religion that comes to largely replace the Abrahamic faiths, was also published in 1954. The Edgar Box genre novels sold well and earned the blacklisted Vidal a secret living.The Boston Globe: Diane White, "Murder, He Wrote, Before Becoming a Man of Letters", 25 March 2011. Retrieved July 11, 2011Vidal, Gore. "Introduction to Death in the Fifth Position, in Edgar Box, Death in the Fifth Position (Vintage, 2011), pp. 5–6. That success led Vidal to write in other genres, including the stage play The Best Man: A Play about Politics (1960) and the television play Visit to a Small Planet (1957). Two early teleplays were A Sense of Justice (1955) and Honor. He also wrote the pulp novel Thieves Fall Out under the pseudonym Cameron Kay but refused to have it reprinted under his real name.
In the 1960s, Vidal published Julian (1964), about the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate (r. A.D. 361–363), who sought to reinstate polytheistic paganism when he saw Christianity as a threat to the cultural integrity of the Roman Empire; Washington, D.C. (1967), about political life during Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency (1933–1945); and Myra Breckinridge (1968), a satire of the American movie business by way of a school of dramatic arts owned by a transsexual woman, the eponymous anti-heroine.