Vidal, Gore, 1925-2012

Eugene Luther Gore Vidal; born Eugene Louis Vidal, October 3, 1925, West Point, New York; died July 31, 2012, Los Angeles, California; American writer and public intellectual known for his patrician manner, epigrammatic wit, and polished style of writing.

Vidal was born into a political family; his maternal grandfather, Thomas Pryor Gore, served as United States senator from Oklahoma (1907–1921 and 1931–1937). Vidal himself was a Democratic Party politician who twice sought elected office; first to the United States House of Representatives (New York, 1960), then to the U.S. Senate (California, 1982).

As a political commentator and essayist, Vidal's principal subject was the history of the United States and its society, especially how the militaristic foreign policy reduced the country to a decadent empire. 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, Gore 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. Vidal thought all men and women are potentially bisexual.

As a novelist, Vidal explored the nature of corruption in public and private life. His polished and erudite style of narration readily evoked the time and place of his stories, and perceptively delineated the psychology of his characters. His third novel, The City and the Pillar (1948), offended the literary, political, and moral sensibilities of conservative book reviewers, the plot being about a dispassionately presented male homosexual relationship. In the historical novel genre, Vidal re-created the imperial world of Julian the Apostate (r. AD 361–63) in Julian (1964). Julian was the Roman emperor who used general religious toleration to re-establish pagan polytheism to counter the political subversion of Christian monotheism. In social satire, Myra Breckinridge (1968) explores the mutability of gender role and sexual orientation as being social constructs established by social mores. In Burr (1973) and Lincoln (1984), the 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 the national politics of the United States.

American writer Gore Vidal is known for many popular screenplays, plays and novels, as well as other literary works. He wrote and published more than 200 essays and 24 novels throughout his career, which included a venture into politics, a stint as a popular talk-show guest and even running for political office. Among Vidal's most famous works are the 1960s books Julian and Myra Breckinridge; the 1984 novel Lincoln; his 1993 political work United States: Essays 1952-1992, for which he won the National Book Award; and his 1995 memoir, Palimpsest. Vidal died on July 31, 2012, from complications due to pneumonia, at his home in Hollywood Hills, California.