Gore Vidal\n\n
Eugene Luther Vidal, Jr., better known as Gore Vidal (born October 3, 1925), is a well-known American writer. He was born at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, where his father was an aeronautics instructor. He later adopted, as his first name, the surname of his maternal grandfather.
He was brought up in the Washington, D.C, area, where his grandfather Thomas Gore was a Democratic Senator from Oklahoma. Thomas P. Gore was blind, and the young Vidal frequently acted as his guide, thereby gaining unusual access for a child to the corridors of power. (He became the first child to fly across the Atlantic Ocean.) After graduating from Phillips Exeter Academy, Gore joined the US Army Reserve in 1943. At the age of 21, he wrote his first novel, Williwaw, based upon his military experiences in the Alaskan Harbor Detachment. The book was well received. A few years later, his novel The City and the Pillar, which dealt candidly with gay themes, caused a furor, to the extent that the New York Times refused to review a number of his later books. Subsequently, as sales of his novels slipped, Vidal worked on plays, films, and television series as a scriptwriter. Two of his plays, The Best Man and Visit to a Small Planet, were Broadway hits and, adapted, successful movies.
In the early 1950s, using the pseudonym Edgar Box, he wrote three mystery novels about a fictional detective named Peter Sergeant.
In the 1960s, Vidal wrote a number of novels, either political or historical in terms of their subject matter. Amongst these were Julian, Burr, Washington D.C, Duluth and the transsexual comedies Myra Breckinridge and its sequel, Myron. Particularly noted among his later novels are Lincoln, Creation, and Kalki. Although he wrote the original script for the controversial film Caligula, he tried to have his name removed from the final result.
Ben-Hur was about half his, too—the other half Christopher Fry's—but the death of Sam Zimbalist led to complications in crediting which the Screenwriters Guild resolved by listing the "Contract Writer" that wrote the first version, "separated from ours by at least two other discarded scripts". Charlton Heston was less than pleased with the (carefully and deliberately veiled) homosexuality of a portion of the writing Vidal claims, and has denied Vidal had significant involvement.[1]
Vidal writes chiefly on political, historical, and literary themes. Much of his essay work is collected in the volumes United States and The Last Empire.
Vidal moved to Italy and was cast as himself in Federico Fellini's film Roma. His liberal politics are well-documented and in 1987 he wrote a series of essays entitled Armageddon, exploring the intricacies of power in contemporary America, and ruthlessly pillorying the then presidential incumbent Ronald Reagan, whom he has famously described as a "triumph of the embalmer's art". Besides his politician grandfather, Vidal has other connections to the Democratic Party; his mother Nina married Hugh D. Auchincloss, Jr, who was the stepfather of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. Vidal is a 5th cousin of Jimmy Carter. He believes he's cousin to Al Gore, but attempts to trace the common ancestor have found none within the New World Gores.[1] He was also an unsuccessful Democratic candidate for Congress in 1960, losing a very close election in a traditionally Republican district on the Hudson River. He lost a second attempt in 1982, despite the backing of such liberal celebrities as Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.
He co-starred in the 1994 film Bob Roberts with Tim Robbins, as well as other films, notably Gattaca and With Honors.
Vidal is noted as a self-publicist and if a more accurate definition of his view on things were required, this is neatly summed up in the tongue-in-cheek assertion from a magazine interview: "There is not one human problem that could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise."
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