Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal (1925-2012) was an American novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and political commentator whose six-decade output ranged across historical fiction, contemporary satire, and combative public criticism. Born in West Point, New York and raised in the household of his blind grandfather Senator Thomas Gore, he absorbed politics and literature in equal measure, traits that would shape every later page he wrote.

His third novel The City and the Pillar (1948) was among the first major American novels to portray homosexuality without apology, an act that briefly shut him out of mainstream review pages. He turned to playwriting, screenwriting, and the pseudonymous Edgar Box mysteries during the 1950s, contributing scripts to live television drama and to Hollywood productions including Ben-Hur.

Vidal returned to fiction with the satirical bestseller Myra Breckinridge (1968) and built a long sequence of historical novels collectively known as the Narratives of Empire, beginning with Washington, D.C. and including Burr (1973), Lincoln (1984), and Empire (1987). The series reread American history through skeptical, gossip-sharp prose.

His essays, gathered in volumes such as United States: Essays 1952-1992, won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 1993. He ran twice for public office, debated William F. Buckley Jr. on national television in 1968, and lived for decades in Ravello, Italy, returning often to American letters as a contrarian elder.

The given name Gore is an English surname-turned-first-name from Old English gara, meaning a triangular plot of land. He carried it from his maternal grandfather's family and made it, for many readers, synonymous with literary combat.