Introduction: The Gore Vidal legend
Gore Vidal was born into the heart of Washington, D. C.’s social and political elite on 3 October 1925, yet his work as a novelist, essayist, dramatist, and political activist is that of an apostate to his class and provides a unique perspective on the United States.
In the sequence of seven historical novels that open with the Revolution of 1776 in Burr (1973), and close at the dawn of the Cold War in The Golden Age (2000), Vidal charts a revisionist narrative of the country’s transformation from an isolationist republic to a global empire. In his satirical fiction, he explores how the social and political media machine fixed this transformation in the national psyche, from cinema and advertising in Myra Breckinridge (1968) to the fusion of politics and television fiction in Duluth (1983). In two novels set in the ancient world, Julian (1964) and Creation (1981), he challenges the religious and cultural foundations of Western culture on which this change was founded. Furthermore, he was a pioneer in sexual politics, and consistently ahead of his time. The City and the Pillar (1948) was the first novel to feature a protagonist whose homosexuality did not conform to stereotype. His diverse essays run parallel to the aims of his fiction, and are delivered in a strong, personal voice that provides a coda to its work. Often maligned as un-American, Vidal is in fact an essentially American writer, and critical to an understanding of the country he dubbed “the United States of Amnesia” (The Last Empire 318).
At least, that is the Authorized Version, the legend that Vidal devoted his career to building. Yet there are far too many inconsistencies and contradictions in his work for this neat framework to hold. The uneven quality of his output – an unevenness that is decidedly extreme – has led to a fractured literary legacy. While the critic Harold Bloom found a “masterly […] historical novelist” whose “imagination of American politics […] is so powerful as to compel awe” (“The Central Man”), the author Anthony Burgess questioned Vidal’s talents as a novelist and thought his “true gift was in the form of the essay” (interview, Empire of Self, 150). Jason Epstein, Vidal’s editor at Random House, claimed “he had too much ego to be a writer of fiction because he couldn’t subordinate himself to other people the way you have to as a novelist” (Kaplan, Gore Vidal, 771). The critical safe ground, the one to which academics and journalists alike so often retreat, is the orderly conclusion that Vidal was a first-rate essayist and a second-rate novelist. What can any reader, general or academic, make of this disparity?
The first challenge is the sheer volume of work. As the narrator of Vidal’s 1978 satire Kalki despairs when asked to tell her story: “Where to begin?” Vidal wrote 24 novels under his own name and five under pseudonyms. The first US editions of the fiction add up to 8,711 pages; the essays, 3,767; and the plays and film scripts, 970. There is also his archive at Houghton Library, Harvard, which contains many unpublished works, extensive materials from political campaigns, and every revision of the novels from Julian onward.
The second challenge is Vidal’s celebrity status, which influenced both his writing and its reception. He once quipped, “I belong to the highest class there is: I’m a third-generation celebrity. My grandfather, father, and I have all been on the cover of Time. You can’t go any higher in America” (Weiner, 90). Vidal used his celebrity to voice nonconformist ideas to a global audience. In a collection of quotations from Vidal’s television and print interviews, View from a Window, Robert J. Stanton introduces him as “one of America’s greatest living writers, who is also an international celebrity” (13). To add a further element, Vidal was also an occasional actor. And in 1996 he hosted his own television series, The American Presidency. Delivered from a mock-up of the White House television studio, it is a bravura performance full of drama, emotion, and wry mischief.
Thus do the disparate elements move into alignment. The writer, the celebrity, and the actor were essential to the creation of a legend that protected the professional ambitions of the writer and the personal life of the man. Vidal claimed he did not care what anyone thought of his writing when the truth was the opposite. He declared repeatedly and often that he did not need love, and when asked if he had ever struggled with his sexuality answered defiantly: “Absolutely never […] I did exactly what I wanted to do all the time” (Stanton, Conversations with Gore Vidal, 20). Yet the naive twenty-year-old who wrote The City and the Pillar dramatized a profound struggle with his sexuality that is also documented by Anaïs Nin in Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary 1939-1947, in which he despairs, “my homosexuality Is incurable” (536). Vidal laboured hard on his legend building and it is a challenge to see through it. Nevertheless, between the lines, Vidal’s work reveals a man in conflict between his intellect and his emotions. As his biographer Jay Parini wrote, he “had a fragile sense of his own reality, though he would erect a vast empire of self on this slender foundation” (Empire of Self, 63).
A Troubled Childhood
Gore Vidal’s need to build a legend was determined by the two domineering personalities that overshadowed his childhood: his mother, Nina Vidal, and her father, Thomas Pryor Gore.
Vidal was systematically traumatised by the alcoholic Nina. His father, Eugene Vidal, distanced himself from Nina’s volatile tantrums and all but abandoned his son to her custody. Fred Kaplan wrote that Nina kept “repeating, loudly, her claim to attention” and “was hell on those who lived with her”. By his second year, Vidal “babbled a great deal, thereafter incessantly”, and Nina increasingly saw her talkative son as an obstacle. When he was nine, she saw “dysfunction”, and “hated his constant reading”, so sent him to a doctor because his “love of theatricality was a danger sign that might indicate homosexual tendencies” (Kaplan, Gore Vidal, 38, 39, 70, 80). Despite this, no work on Vidal has yet explored how a strong and capable woman could have acted out in frustration at the limits imposed upon her by an authoritarian father and a rigid patriarchal society. And it is not hard to see her ability to navigate a man’s world play out in a range of Vidal’s characters, from historical works such as Creation through to satires such as Myra Breckinridge.
The young Vidal experienced the brunt of Nina’s frustration, and his only respite was at the house of his maternal grandparents where, from the age of five, he would read the Congressional Record as well as “history, poetry, economics” (Palimpsest, 48) to his blind grandfather. The four-term Senator Gore (1907-21, 1931-37) planned to continue his legacy with a political career for his grandson and supplied the foundations on which Vidal built his herculean body of work.
Although elected a Democrat, Gore began his political career as a spokesman for Populism, a political movement that challenged the effects of the industrial North on the agrarian South. His emphasis on economic individualism and limited government was considered anachronistic in the 1930s, when the New Deal programmes of the Roosevelt administration witnessed an unprecedented extension of federal power. Correspondingly, the Hollywood cinema that fascinated the adolescent Vidal reflected the framework of New Deal optimism. This tangle of contradictory political idealism would have a profound and decisive impact on his thinking.
When Vidal was ten, his parents were divorced, and Nina married millionaire stockbroker Hugh D. Auchincloss. He was then sent from one boarding school to the next: St. Albans in Washington, D.C., Los Alamos Ranch School, and finally Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. Baptised Eugene Luther Gore Vidal at thirteen – the “Gore” was an addition he requested – he dropped Eugene Luther at fourteen when he enrolled at Exeter. It was here that he initiated the legend of Gore Vidal.
At Exeter, Vidal set out to become the politician his grandfather planned for him to be. He debated for the America First isolationist movement, and his understanding of the movement remained fixed in an idealised 1940. It was bound inextricably with his new name, his standing as class politician, and his liberation from Nina’s influence. What Vidal refused to acknowledge throughout his career was that, as Sarah Churchwell pointed out, America First “brought together pacifists, socialists and conscientious objectors with libertarians, nativists and fascists” (Behold America, 270). “I was very much on the Right”, he later recalled of this time. “You have class responses, which, as a kid, I was not about to start analysing” (Stanton, Conversations with Gore Vidal, 105). Nevertheless, the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 brought an end to such debate, and the patriotic young Vidal enlisted upon graduation in 1943.
Apprenticeship Years
According to his legend, Vidal was a war veteran and self-made man who carved out his own career as a novelist. This conveniently passes over his extensive privilege. As he recalled in the 1973 essay ‘West Point’, rather than being “shunted off to an infantry outfit”, he “signaled to the nonexistent but very real West Point Protective Association “ (Matters of Fact and of Fiction, 195). His experience in the Aleutians, far from the Front, gave him the material for his first novel. And then, through his father’s connections, he landed an editorial job at the publisher E.P. Dutton. When Dutton published Williwaw (1946), he left the job and persuaded his father to turn over the bonds put aside for his education. He used his social and political connections to exploit the New York literary scene, where he fell under the influence of Anaïs Nin, a Nina-substitute who would exert a lifelong influence.
Williwaw was followed in quick succession by In a Yellow Wood (1947), The City and the Pillar (1948), The Season of Comfort (1949), A Search for the King (1950), and Dark Green, Bright Red (1950). He worked “ferociously, unremittingly”, Tennessee Williams observed in 1950, and his books “are now stacked up like planes over an airport, waiting for the runway” (Selected Letters Volume II, 288). Dawn Powell admired Vidal’s “capacity for work, in spite of perfect capacity for climbing”, which she thought “has driven him to do too much and without direction” (337).
In this early work, Vidal reflected the critical standard that the novel should represent the interior drama. The struggle of the central protagonist to find a place in the world, to reach maturity by casting off the trappings of youth, was his primary focus, yet there was also an element that tended towards social protest. The City and the Pillar is driven by social commentary, and argues for “a world where sex was natural and not fearsome, where men could love men naturally, the way they were meant to, as well as to love women naturally, the way they were meant to” (286).
“I had taken on the whole establishment”, Vidal recalled in 1988, and said, “you’ve got sex all wrong” (Stanton, Conversations with Gore Vidal, 106). This event would become a keystone in his legend as his claim to be the Rebel who fought the System. Yet as Robert Stanton wrote in his bibliography, the reviews in general “found it more of a worthwhile social tract than a good novel. In fact, he was praised by some for writing on the subject of an American taboo: homosexuality. It is the writing itself which received unfavourable remarks, not the subject” (Gore Vidal: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography, xiv). Over the years, Vidal changed the story through relentless repetition, and claimed that a blackout of his work has been initiated by the chief reviewer at the New York Times, Orville Prescott. Yet as Michael Meshaw commented, he transformed the response to the book into his “origin myth” (62).
Far from being the anti-establishment rebel he would eventually become, the young Vidal was, as Norman Mailer recalled, “an arch conservative, virtually a loyalist” (cited in Kaplan, Gore Vidal, 363). He even thought of the post-war years as a “golden age”, a cultural and political renaissance from which would emerge “a literature to celebrate the new American empire” (“Visit to a Small Planet”, 1160).
The City and the Pillar is also Vidal’s first attempt to come to terms with the death of his school friend Jimmie Trimble, an event that would become a cornerstone of the legend equal to the publication of the book. By the time he wrote his memoir Palimpsest (1995), Vidal had thoroughly reinvented his relationship with Jimmie. Whether or not it was a physical relationship, it is clear Vidal was in love with Trimble. “Jimmie was more like a symbol […] I don’t think you can take it at face value”, Howard Austen, Vidal’s partner of 53 years, told Jay Parini (Empire of Self, 48). In the early works, Jimmie appears in many different guises, and he was one of the trappings of youth to be cast off.
The City and the Pillar brought Thomas Pryor Gore’s plans for his grandson’s political career to an end. Nina’s response was to tell him to seek a “cure” for his homosexuality. She suggested an analyst “that has done a great deal” for her friends (cited in Kaplan, Gore Vidal, 290). Even though The City and the Pillar was a bestseller, the following books marked a decline in sales. It was time for a change.
A Change in Direction
1950 was a critical year for Vidal. He settled in a house at Edgewater, on the banks of the Hudson River, and met Howard Austen, the man with whom he would live until Austen’s death in 2003. He studied Henry James, Flaubert, and Petronius. From his reading of Virgil and Plato he set out his argument that “for many men homosexual acts are normal (natural) expressions of their sexuality”. He was on “the verge of a major change in writing style and novelistic vision” (Kaplan, Gore Vidal, 330, 334).
Vidal responded to declining sales by writing pulp fiction. He started with a potboiler about a tragic Hollywood actress in 1949, A Star’s Progress, but in 1950 he drew on his social and political background for this work. In the Edgar Box mysteries Death in the Fifth Position (1952) and Death Before Bedtime (1953), he was able to question political corruption in the early McCarthy years, and although the plot resolutions proved conservative, this prepared for his emergence as a dissident.
The Judgment of Paris (1952) marked a significant change in his literary writing. “I am deeply impressed by the cogency of the writing and the liquid smooth style”, Tennessee Williams wrote (Selected Letters Volume II, 421). The reviews were generally positive, yet the novel did not sell.
Messiah (1954) is the first of Vidal’s significant works and signalled toward the satirist he would become. It charts the rise of twentieth-century prophet John Cave, and how a new religion was sold through a calculated use of television. When Dawn Powell read the book, she found it “engaging enough, but the trouble with being a clear, sharply cut, extraordinary individual with a rich articulate gift is that no characters can equal the author himself” (338). Powell could see the potential, yet it was clear that Vidal had still to find not only his voice, but a medium for that voice.
By 1954, Vidal had started to write for television. With his first television play, Dark Possession, he started triumphantly on a new career. In 1955, Visit to a Small Planet turned him into a “nationally known television dramatist” (Kaplan, Gore Vidal, 374). It led to this successful Broadway run in 1957 when he adapted it for the stage. And crucially, he was also turning into a drama critic and developing yet another new career, that of an essayist.
In 1958, a significant change in Vidal’s personal life prepared him for a meaningful change in his writing. His relationship with Nina came to an end after she visited him in London and complained that she was not invited anywhere because her son was “a fag and his companion not only a fag but a Jew” (Kaplan, Gore Vidal, 434). In attacking Howard, Nina crossed a line, and Vidal told her to leave. He never spoke to her again.
The Accomplished Politician, the Essayist, and the Novelist
The first sign of a major change was the publication of Three in 1959. It included a novel-in-progress, “Julian the Apostate”, which featured sections from the opening chapters of Julian (1964) and the closing journal entries during the war against Persia. It showed that Vidal had at last found a character to equal his own.
In 1960, his play The Best Man opened on Broadway and ran for 560 performances. Christopher Isherwood, one of his most perceptive critics, described it as “probably the best thing he has done” (Isherwood, 859). Jack and Jackie Kennedy came to see the play in a blaze of publicity. This was another instance of Vidal’s privileged background at work: Jackie’s mother had married Hugh D. Auchincloss after he was divorced from Nina. Vidal worked this connection relentlessly. Later that year, he ran for Congress on the Democratic ticket and, although he lost, he ran ahead of the Kennedy ticket.
Vidal continued to work on Julian and to write essays. The publication of Rocking the Boat in 1962 showed that “Vidal was immediately seen as a powerful essayist”, Robert Stanton noted (Gore Vidal: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography, xvi). Then a New York newspaper strike that protested against low wages and automation led to the creation of The New York Review of Books in 1963, and Vidal the essayist found the ideal place to publish. During this time became disillusioned with the Kennedy presidency and started to distance himself from America. The unmistakable rebellion began in January 1963 when he and Howard took up residence in an apartment in Rome.
In his book Eminent Outlaws, Christopher Bram made the astute point that “the first-person essay helped Vidal find his strengths as a novelist” (131). Julian is a first-person account that showcases both Vidal’s strong narrative skills and his acute sense of dramatic timing. The counterbalance between Julian’s memoir and the commentary of his teachers, Priscus and Libanius, results in a masterful portrait of a tragic hero. The drive behind Julian’s mission lifts it above Vidal’s prior work: it is the first of his novels to sustain a deeply convincing emotional and intellectual tone. When the narrators lament the passing of the Hellenistic world, Vidal is lamenting the passing of the American republic.
The reviews eclipsed those of previous works. Walter Allen in the New York Review of Books wrote that it “brings together and dramatizes more effectively and with much greater authority than ever before preoccupations that have been present in his fiction almost from its beginnings” (30 July 1964). Yet in a review that validates part of Vidal’s legend – his conflict with the New York Times – the critic Orville Prescott damned it as “competent and moderately interesting […] but flawed by numerous dull passages and by much pedestrian prose” (New York Times, 10 June 1964). It not only sold well but went to number one on the best-seller list. This was partly due to Vidal’s status as a television celebrity. He was due to appear on the Today show to “mostly to talk about politics” (Point to Point Navigation, 54), but his editor suggested he talk about the book. The following day, the first print run had sold out. Vidal’s uncanny timing was also a factor: his depiction of a fallen hero, on which he had worked for almost ten years, was published in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination.
With the successful return to the novel, Vidal revised some of the earlier books. Most changes were minor. However, The City and the Pillar saw major revisions, and Dark Green, Bright Red was cut by over half. With the revision of the early work, the legend started to come into focus.
Additionally, in writing Julian, Vidal cultivated an understanding of the nature of empire, which in turn prompted his reinvention as a revisionist historian. Vidal wrote the first pages of Washington, D. C. (1967) in 1962. When he returned to the manuscript in 1965, he had a darker view of his native land. The book spans the years from Roosevelt’s battle with the Supreme Court in 1937 through to the downfall of Joseph McCarthy in 1954. It registered a decisive change in his political thought. The reviews of this melodramatic, third-person narrative were mixed, praising his storytelling control yet noting the flatness of character. It hit the bestseller list.
A month after the publication of Washington, D. C., Vidal started to write Myra Breckinridge. He began on 25 March and completed the first draft in record time on 18 April. Television, pulp fiction and stage writing had schooled him in satire, but here he ascended to a whole new level with yet another dramatic shift in direction. It is the first of his iconoclastic satirical arias, and its free-association writing showed a writer who was clearly on the neurodivergent spectrum. Written in the form of a diary, it is a record of Myra’s mission to “recreate the sexes and save the human race from certain extinction” (7). Myra’s identity is shaped by Hollywood cinema, yet her trans identity, which is not revealed until page 223 of 264, undermines its idealised gender absolutes, and unveils the extent to which they were no more than a cultural fiction. The book also brought into play an uncannily fitting acronym of his name: I love drag.
There were no advance copies ahead of publication in February 1968. A rushed hatchet job appeared in the New York Times on 3 February, yet within a few weeks the book was a bestseller. Again, Vidal’s timing proved exceptional, as it was in 1968 that the country turned against the war in Vietnam. His televised debates with conservative commentator William F. Buckley during the 1968 presidential primaries then confirmed Vidal’s public role as a dissident. The controversy this generated, culminating in Buckley shouting “shut up you queer” on live television, became the subject of Best of Enemies, the title of both a documentary film (2015) and a stage play (2021). It was another keystone in the legend that Vidal would invoke repeatedly.
The 1960s ended with a second collection of essays, Reflections upon a Sinking Ship, that cemented his standing as an essayist. He was far ahead of his time on environmental issues, sexual politics, and the corruption endemic to the American political system. Yet the reviews were uneven, noting “a genuinely aristocratic temper” (Friedenberg), and that he was “cheerfully disillusioned” (Unsigned review, “Pangs and Needles”). Nevertheless, Vidal ended the decade as he had started it: in triumph.
The Best Man
At the start of the 1970s, Vidal’s disillusionment deepened. His efforts to renounce his citizenship in protest against the war in Vietnam were frustrated. He bought a house in Ravello, Italy, and was forced to re-examine his beliefs.
In Two Sisters: A Novel in the Form of a Memoir (1970), Vidal is working out his sense of self against a semi-fictional background. Unlike the autobiographical elements of The Season of Comfort and Washington, D.C., he uses the first-person voice of the essays. While many of the reflections are legend-building exercises, the book is at times revealing: “Death, summer, youth – this triad continues to haunt me every day of my life for it was in summer that my generation left for war, and several dozen that one knew (but strictly speaking did not love, except perhaps for one) were killed […]” (11). As the war in Vietnam went on and the death toll mounted, he recalled – and for the first time named – Jimmie. Then, when Richard Nixon extended the war instead of making good on his “secret plan” to end it, he wrote the play An Evening with Richard Nixon (1972). It targets Nixon’s many contradictions and measures each “new” political stand against previous ones to show Nixon’s opportunism. Neither of these works was a success.
Then, in October 1972, the collection Homage to Daniel Shays: Essays 1952-1972 was published. Stephen Spender compared him to Francis Bacon and Montaigne in the New York Review of Books (22 March 1973). Vidal first used the phrase “the United States, Inc.” in an essay on Howard Hughes (432), and in the controversial “Women’s Liberation Meets Miller-Mailer-Manson Man” he took on Norman Mailer’s attack on feminism. He makes the astute point that “words govern us more than anatomy” and notes that gender identity is no more than a product of “indoctrination” (390, 392).
Returning to the era of the Founding Fathers in Burr (1973), he wrote his finest work as a revisionist historian. He found a political system established not to protect the rights of “We, the people”, but the owners of property. The technique of dual narrators allows for the innocent Charlie Schuyler to be educated by the experienced Aaron Burr. The mischief of Burr, and his casual deflating of icons, makes for a compelling character. When Burr writes, “our people have always preferred legend to reality – as I know best of all, having become one of the dark legends of the republic, and hardly real” (98), Vidal is at one with his creation. Again, Vidal’s timing was providential. The Watergate controversy was nearing its climax when Burr was published in November 1973.
In an interesting sidenote, Burr has experienced a revival in the years leading up to Vidal’s centenary in 2025. Following the runaway success of the musical Hamilton, it was reissued in the UK with a new cover with the words THE MAN WHO SHOT HAMILTON featured prominently above the title. Sales “increased considerably”, according to the publisher.
Vidal returned to the Nixon era in Myron (1974), a sequel to Myra Breckinridge that stages a battle between the happily married Myron, representative of the average Nixon voter, and the crusading Myra. Their fight for control of their shared body is set against a plot that defies description. Myra continues her mission in the style of the Founding Fathers, and attempts to recreate not only the sexes, but the nation as a whole. Through this conflict, Vidal explores how the expectations of the American people are continually manipulated in the television era. In an inspired move against a Supreme Court decision that enabled state-level censorship, he “replaced the missing bad words with some very good words indeed: the names of the justices who concurred in the Court’s majority decision. Burger, Rehnquist, Powell, Whizzer White and Blackmun fill, as it were, the breach” (Myron, ix).
Vidal’s next book on American history, 1876 (1976), is consistently underrated, mainly because it is read as a sequel to Burr. Although Charlie Schuyler returns as the narrator, and the plot centres on the corruption in the Grant administration scandals, the subject is not its characters but centennial America. Through social history and an exploration of class, Vidal paints a portrait of the country that reverses the usual form, with the larger, more ambitious canvas informed by its characters. This was a new direction for Vidal, and one influenced by his reading of Italo Calvino. It is a book about the process of writing, and how a manipulation of words can create a national identity. “The writer is not unlike the explorer”, Charlie Schuyler comments as his ship pulls into the New York harbour. “We, too, are searching for lost cities, rare tigers, the sentence never before written” (6). The brush strokes of this portrait are thick and heavy in places, but the overall impression casts light on a nation rebuilt as a world power in the wake of the Civil War. It is an impressive achievement and unlike any of his previous books. Yet it confused reviewers, and the general tone was one of disappointment.
The collection Matters of Fact and of Fiction: Essays 1973-1976 was a clear triumph. Walter Clemons, who later started (but did not finish) a biography of Vidal, wrote that he “remains more interesting than his fictions […] and his formidable powers are more steadily apparent in his essays” (Newsweek, 9 May 1977). In the Spectator, Benny Green compared Vidal to Edmund Wilson (3 September 1977), and Stephen Spender wrote “[a]s a critic of manners as well as literature, Vidal is in the tradition of Matthew Arnold and Edmund Wilson” (“Gore Vidal, Essayist”).
Vidal ended the 1970s with the satirical Kalki (1978), a novel he started late in 1976 but had to recast in 1977. Although entertaining, it does not quite come together, which is partly because his editor was ill-suited to the work. “I just didn’t like them”, Jason Epstein said prudishly of the satirical works. “I’m not good at being shocked” (cited in Kaplan, Gore Vidal, 676).
In an apocalyptic narrative, Vietnam vet J. J. Kelly claims he is Kalki, the ninth incarnation of Vishnu, here to bring about the end of this world. His rise to celebrity is not about ideology but the power of advertising. Through the use of a deadly virus, Kelly destroys the world in order to save it, and he ultimately embodies the American imperial progress. The reviews were flat. Writing in the National Review, Maureen Bodo concluded, although “it is not a bad novel […] it is disappointing” (12 May 1978). Vidal ended the 1970s as he began, disheartened and somewhat adrift.
The first half of the 1980s, in contrast, saw him reinvigorated. In three successive novels and one book of essays, his writing peaked. Creation (1981), a historical novel set in the fifth century BCE, is narrated by the fictional Cyrus Spitama, grandson of the prophet Zoroaster. It is told to his nephew Democritus, much as Vidal learned history from his grandfather. Like 1876, Creation recreates the world of the fifth century BCE in razor-sharp, awe-inspiring detail. It also showed Vidal’s keen historical acumen: he understood the latest research into the history of Persia in ways far ahead of the academic field of study. As Maria Brosius noted in A History of Ancient Persia, “only in the 1980s” did the studies of Persia start to change (3). Creation is a flawed masterpiece, yet it is still a masterpiece. Vidal’s definitive 2002 revision restored sections cut by the questionable editorial decisions of Epstein after he griped, “I wanted another book on American history, not this” (cited in Parini, Empire of Self, 257).
A renewed political vigour, brought on by the election of former B-movie actor Ronald Reagan to the Presidency, led him to run in the 1982 Democratic Senate Primary in California. He spoke against the neoconservative Reagan administration and took a populist stand against the inequities of advanced capitalism. He polled 15 percent of the vote.
The Second American Revolution and Other Essays (1976-1982) features some of Vidal’s finest essays, from “Christopher Isherwood’s Kind” to the hard-hitting “Pink Triangle and Yellow Star”, in which he challenges the homophobia of the right-wing Jewish intellectual Midge Decter and equates her logic towards “homosexualists” with Hitler’s towards the Jewish people. In the essay “Thomas Love Peacock: The Novel of Ideas”, first published in 1980, Vidal notes in an aside that although the movie-goer is “passive, unlike the reader […] the kind of satire practised by Aristophanes may just find its way onto the screen” (130). He then talks about how the “highly enjoyable” Airplane might have done this, but “a chance was missed to send up a whole society in a satire of the Old Comedy sort” (131). In response, he wrote the most subversive of his satires, Duluth (1983).
To Vidal, the Reagan presidency was the equivalent of a bad television series, and so wrote the present-tense Duluth in television format. Its 88 short chapters – or, rather, scenes – are a damning look at a national identity forged from socially and politically reductive television entertainments. Vidal’s fictional city of Duluth carves a geographical triangle across the States. It is an American version of the Eiffel Tower, as seen by Roland Barthes. Television is at its northern peak and looks over this triangle like the all-seeing eye above the pyramid on the back of the dollar bill, and what it sees is a country run by the interests of money. The majority of reviewers did not know what to make of it, but Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, a regular Vidal reviewer, wrote that “Vidal has come up with a knockout” and called it a “savagely inhuman comedy” (New York Times, 20 May 1983). It is a book that only a neurodivergent mind could have written – and, judging by the critical reaction, a book that only a neurodivergent mind can understand.
As S. T. Joshi noted in his bibliography, “few readers knew what to make of the bizarre, surrealistic novel Duluth”, Lincoln (1984) “brought him the greatest admiration of any single work he had written” (7). Written in the third person, Lincoln is constructed as a series of first-person perspectives, all of which shine a light on the multifaceted Lincoln. The narrative is written in a filmic manner as the scenes flow together and the camera shifts from one character to the next. It is also deeply character-led. Vidal’s portraits of William Seward, Salmon P. Chase, and Lincoln are extraordinary and rich in a way unmatched by his other fiction. It is through Seward that Vidal delivers his verdict on Lincoln, who is struck by the realisation that while they had for three years been calling for “a Cromwell […] no one had suspected that there had been, from the beginning, a single-minded dictator in the White House, a Lord Protector of the Union by whose will alone the war had been prosecuted” (459). It is a chilling and powerful moment when the wiliest of operators realises he has been outplayed by a political genius. Published in April 1984 when Vidal was 58, Lincoln is a haunting novel about power, ambition, and the price the nation paid for Lincoln’s vision. It is an astounding achievement.
Decline and Fall
Following the heights of Lincoln, there was a decline in the quality of Vidal’s work so sudden that it is hard to fathom. His friend Michael Meshaw, when promoting his book Sympathy for the Devil in 2015, told Charlie Rose that Vidal’s drinking had increased dramatically by the time he was 57, and that he sank into a depression from which he never recovered. It is clear that Vidal stopped learning and exploring and replaced this with grandstanding. This increased his tendency to reach reductive conclusions in the essays, and to be so instructive in the historical novels that the characters do not come to life.
The next two novels in the American sequence, Empire (1987) and Hollywood (1990), are sprawling, directionless melodramas. These third-person narratives are packed tight with a stream of interchangeable, one-dimensional characters. Edmund White dismissed the books as “pure taxidermy” (Teeman, 251). The essay collection At Home (1988) shows a decline in quality. There are occasional standouts, but many of the essays are more opinion than exploration and discovery. It is as if Vidal was no longer as interested in his subjects as he is in delivering his opinion about them. His fury at 1980s America is delivered in a language of Good against Evil that mirrors the Cold War rhetoric he routinely ridiculed.
Yet, ever the warrior, Vidal returned to form at the start of the 1990s. Jay Parini collected the best of the critical writings on Vidal’s work in Writer Against the Grain (1992), and secured Kaplan as biographer. This was a cue for Vidal to ensure all the elements of the legend were securely in place. In 1991, he delivered three lectures that were published as Screening History (1992). This semi-autobiographical sketch of the movies that shaped him from childhood through to the writing of his first novel maintains a clear focus. “My life has paralleled, when not intersected, the entire history of the talking picture” (6), he begins. From here, he considers how “we are both defined and manipulated by fictions of such potency that they are able to replace our own experience”. It is a powerful piece of writing.
Vidal then returned to the satirical novel with Live From Golgotha (1992). The premise is that a computer hacker is systematically destroying Christianity by erasing the gospels from history. The narrator is a disciple of St Paul’s, Timothy, and it is his mission to save Christianity as well as to host the crucifixion, live, from Golgotha. The resulting battle over control of the Greatest Story Ever Told is an allegorical investigation into the powers struggling for hegemony in the face of the Communist collapse. The focus and direction are strong, and although it does not reach the heights of Myra Breckinridge and Duluth, it is deeply funny and just plain naughty. Again, Vidal shows a keen awareness of the latest technology, the internet, and the impact it could have on the culture. The book made critics uncomfortable and it is the satire with the fewest champions.
In his memoir Palimpsest (1995), Vidal made a pre-emptive strike to ensure the legend was in place before Kaplan could finish his biography. He looked back, rediscovered Jimmie, and went on a sentimental journey to make Jimmie’s death the cornerstone of his legend as the man who no longer needed love. “When I came to read the Symposium”, he writes, “I was amazed at how precisely Plato had anticipated two boys twenty-three hundred years later” (30). This poppycock line would have made him hoot with derision if it had been written by someone else. Then, in The Smithsonian Institution (1998), Vidal tried and failed to meld satire and history in order to save both Jimmie’s life and the US from its imperial fate. In the last of his novels, The Golden Age (2000), Vidal turned to the America of his youth. The last in the historical sequence was “a rather tepid performance”, as Parini concluded (Empire of Self, 358).
With the advent of the Bush administration, Vidal’s focus returned to the current political stage. In the pamphlets Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (2002), Dreaming War (2002), and Imperial America (2004), he criticised the Bush administration and its use of the September 11 attacks as the pretext for unilateral action. The reviewers noted his drift toward crackpot conspiracy theories, and later Christopher Hitchens wrote in an article provocatively titled ‘Vidal Loco’, “What business does this patrician have in the gutter markets, where paranoids jabber and the coinage is debased by every sort of vulgarity?” (Vanity Fair, February 2010).
In early 2003, Vidal and Howard Austen sold the property in Ravello, Italy, and returned to live full-time in the US, where Austen died on 25 September. In his second memoir, Point to Point Navigation (2006), Vidal wrote a detailed account of this time. The book has its moments, but is more of a fireside chat than a memoir, yet the chapter on Howard’s death is moving and powerful. Vidal also recorded an unabridged audio version, and to listen to him read his own work is a rare treat.
In the following years, Vidal spiralled downward. His pronounced alcoholism led to increasingly erratic behaviour, and he died on 31 July 2012. In his controversial Will, he left his papers, his library, and $37 million to Harvard University. The money funds the Gore Vidal Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts at Houghton Library; the Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing; and the Gore Vidal Endowment Fund for Arts and Letters, which funds continuing acquisitions by Houghton Library. The role of literary executor also passed from Parini to Harvard. As always, Vidal had the last word. Like his best writing, it defied convention and was all on his own terms.
The frustrating inconsistency of Vidal’s work produced a literary legacy that is more convenient than factual, yet the consensus that he was a first-rate essayist and a second-rate novelist still holds sway. Yet Vidal produced seven great novels, Julian, Myra Breckinridge, Burr, 1876, Creation, Duluth, and Lincoln, and the essay collections, Homage to Daniel Shays, Matters of Fact and of Fiction, and The Second American Revolution, are exceptional.
“When you write about anyone you are simply catching reflections of dead stars the way telescopes do”, Vidal observed in an interview with Heather Neilson, author of the finest critical introduction to Vidal’s work to date, Political Animal: Gore Vidal on Power (2014). Of Lincoln, he added, “He is gone, and all that’s left is what we make of him” (129). In many ways, Vidal was like Lincoln: behind the legend, he was somewhat of a mystery, and a man whose ambition was, to use the words of Lincoln’s law partner William Herndon, “a little engine that knew no rest”. It is only possible for the reader to find the man behind the legend in the reflections from the light between the lines of his work.
It is remarkable what Gore Vidal achieved in a single lifetime. “Yet art is mostly failure”, he wrote in 1957. “It is only from a succession of daring, flawed works that the occasional masterwork comes” (Rocking the Boat, 272). Vidal’s masterworks may only amount to one-fifth of his published writings – yet what masterworks they are, and greater in number than most authors’ dreams are made on.
Works Cited
Allen, Walter. “The Last Pagan”. New York Review of Books, 30 July 1964.
Bloom, Harold. “The Central Man”. New York Review of Books, 19 July 1984.
Bodo, Maureen. “His Own Worst Enemy”. National Review, 12 May 1978.
Bram, Christopher. Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America. Twelve, 2012.
Brosius, Maria. A History of Ancient Persia: The Achaemenid Empire. Blackwell, 2020.
Broughall, Quentin. Gore Vidal and Antiquity: Sex, Politics and Religion. Kindle edition. Routledge, 2022.
Burgess, Anthony. “Honest Abe’s Obsession”. Times Literary Supplement, 28 September 1984.
Churchwell, Sarah. Behold America. Bloomsbury, 2018.
Clemons, Walter. “Witlash”. Newsweek, 9 May 1977.
Friedenberg, Edgar Z. “Patriotic Gore”. New York Review of Books, 19 June 1969.
Gopnik, Blake. Warhol. Allen Lane, 2020.
Green, Benny. “Joker”. Spectator, 3 September 1977.
Hitchens, Christopher. “Vidal Loco”. Vanity Fair, February 2010.
Isherwood, Christopher. Diaries Volume One: 1939-1960. Vintage, 2011.
Joshi, S.T. Gore Vidal: A Comprehensive Bibliography. Scarecrow Press, 2007.
Kaplan, Fred. Gore Vidal. Random House, 1999.
---. Introduction. The Essential Gore Vidal. Random House, 1999.
Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. ‘Books of the Times.’ New York Times, 20 May 1983.
Meshaw, Michael. Sympathy for the Devil: Four Decades of Friendship with Gore Vidal. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2015.
Neilson, Heather. Political Animal: Gore Vidal on Power. Clayton, Victoria: 2014.
Nin, Anaïs. Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1939-1947. Kindle edition. Swallow Press, 2015.
Parini, Jay. Empire of Self. Doubleday, 2015.
---. ed. Gore Vidal: Writer Against the Grain. Andre Deutsch, 1992.
Powell, Dawn. The Diaries of Dawn Powell, 1931-1965. Steerforth Press, 1995.
Prescott, Orville. “Books of the Times: The Apostate Emperor”. New York Times, 10 June 1964.
Spender, Stephen. “Private Eye”. New York Review of Books, 22 March 1973.
---. “Gore Vidal, Essayist”. New York Times Book Review, 17 April 1977.
Stanton, Robert J. Gore Vidal: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography. G.K. Hall, 1978.
---. Views from a Window: Conversations with Gore Vidal. Citadel Press, 1980.
Teeman, Tim. In Bed With Gore Vidal: Hustlers, Hollywood, and the Private World of an American Master.Magnus Boos, 2013.
Unsigned review. “Pangs and Needles”. Time, 28 March 1969.
Vidal, Gore. The American Presidency. Odonian Press, 1998.
---. 1876. Random House, 1976.
---. The City and the Pillar. E. P. Dutton, 1948.
---. Homage to Daniel Shays: Essays 1952-1972. Random House, 1972.
---. The Last Empire. Doubleday, 2001.
---. Matters of Fact and of Fiction: Essays 1973-1976. Random House, 1976.
---. Myra Breckinridge. Little Brown, 1968.
---. Myron. Random House, 1974.
---. Palimpsest. Random House: 1995.
---. Papers, Harvard: Houghton. https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/24/resources/3148
---. Point To Point Navigation: A Memoir. Vintage, 2006.
---. Reflections Upon a Sinking Ship. Little, Brown, 1969.
---. The Second American Revolution and Other Essays (1976-1982). Random House, 1976.
---. Two Sisters: A Novel in the Form of a Memoir. Little, Brown, 1970.
---. United States. Random House, 1992.
Weiner, John, ed. I Told You So: Gore Vidal Talks Politics: Interviews with Jon Wiener. Counterpoint, 2013.
Williams, Tennessee. The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams: Volume Two 1945 - 1957. Oberon Books, 2006.
7626 words
Citation: Bryant, Christopher W.. "Gore Vidal". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 28 June 2002; last revised 02 October 2025. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5009, accessed 15 December 2025.]
