Coordinates	52°2′″N23°7′″N
name	Gore Vidal
pseudonym	Edgar BoxCameron KayKatherine Everard
birth name	Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
birth date	October 03, 1925
birth place	West Point, New York, U.S.
occupation	Novelist, essayist, journalist, playwright
nationality	United States
Parents	Eugene Luther Vidal
genre	Drama, fictional prose, essay, literary criticism
period	1944–present
movement	Postmodernism
ideology	Fascism
influences	Petronius, Apuleius, Thomas Mann, Henry James, Mark Twain, Montaigne, Carson McCullers
influenced	William Kennedy, Clive James, Christopher Hitchens, Truman Capote, Bill Maher}}

Gore Vidal (; born October 3, 1925) is an American author, playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and political activist. Early in his career he wrote ''The City and the Pillar'' (1948), which outraged mainstream critics as one of the first major American novels to feature unambiguous homosexuality. He also ran for political office twice and has been a longtime political critic.

Early years

Vidal was born Eugene Luther Gore Vidal in West Point, New York, the only child of 1st Lieutenant Eugene Luther Vidal (1895–1969) and Nina Gore (1903–1978). He was born in the Cadet Hospital of the United States Military Academy, where his father was the first aeronautics instructor, and was christened by the headmaster of St. Albans preparatory school, his future alma mater. According to "West Point and the Third Loyalty", an article Vidal wrote for ''The New York Review of Books'' (October 18, 1973), he later decided to be called Gore in honor of his maternal grandfather, Thomas Gore, Democratic senator from Oklahoma.

Vidal's father, a West Point football quarterback and captain, and an all-American basketball player, was director of the Commerce Department's Bureau of Air Commerce (1933–1937) in the Roosevelt administration, was one of the first Army Air Corps pilots and, according to biographer Susan Butler, was the great love of Amelia Earhart's life. In the 1920s and 1930s, he was a co-founder of three American airlines: the Ludington Line, which merged with others and became Eastern Airlines, Transcontinental Air Transport (TAT, which became TWA), and Northeast Airlines, which he founded with Earhart, as well as the Boston and Maine Railroad. The elder Vidal was also an athlete in the 1920 and 1924 Summer Olympics (seventh in the decathlon; U.S. pentathlon team coach).

Gore Vidal's mother was an actress and socialite who made her Broadway debut in ''Sign of the Leopard'' in 1928. She married Eugene Luther Vidal, Sr. in 1922 and divorced him in 1935. She later married twice more; one husband, Hugh D. Auchincloss, was later the stepfather of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and, according to Gore Vidal, she had "a long off-and-on affair" with actor Clark Gable. She was an alternate delegate to the 1940 Democratic National Convention.

Vidal had four half-siblings from his parents' later marriages (the Rev. Vance Vidal, Valerie Vidal Hewitt, Thomas Gore Auchincloss, and Nina Gore Auchincloss Steers Straight) and four stepbrothers from his mother's third marriage to Army Air Forces Major General Robert Olds, who died in 1943, ten months after marrying Vidal's mother. Vidal's nephews include the brothers Burr Steers, writer and film director, and painter Hugh Auchincloss Steers (1963–1995).

Vidal was raised in Washington, D.C., where he attended Sidwell Friends School and then St. Albans School. Since Senator Gore was blind, his grandson read aloud to him and was his guide. The senator's isolationism contributed a major principle of his grandson's political philosophy, which is critical of foreign and domestic policies shaped by American imperialism. Gore attended High school in Exeter, New Hampshire at Phillips Exeter Academy, and after graduating in 1943 he joined the U.S. Army Reserve. He was deployed to the Aleutian Islands during World War II, where he served in the Transportation Corps as a Warrant Officer on an Army search and rescue boat and later on a supply vessel.

Personal life

Vidal has had affairs with both men and women. The novelist Anaïs Nin claimed an involvement with Vidal in her memoir ''The Diary of Anaïs Nin'' but Vidal denied it in his memoir ''Palimpsest''. Vidal has also discussed having dalliances with people such as actress Diana Lynn, and has alluded to the possibility that he may have a daughter. He was briefly engaged to Joanne Woodward, before she married Paul Newman; after eloping, the couple shared a house with Vidal in Los Angeles for a short time. In 1950, he met his long-term partner Howard Austen.

During the latter part of the twentieth century Vidal divided his time between Italy and California. In 2003, he sold his 5,000-square-foot (460 m²) Italian Villa, ''La Rondinaia'' (The Swallow's Nest), and moved to Los Angeles. Austen died in November 2003 and, in February 2005, was buried in a plot for himself and Vidal at Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C.

Writing career

Fiction

Vidal, whom a ''Newsweek'' critic called "the best all-around American man of letters since Edmund Wilson," began his writing career at nineteen, with the publication of the military novel ''Williwaw'', based upon his Alaskan Harbor Detachment duty. The novel was successful and the first novel about World War II. A few years later, ''The City and the Pillar'' caused a furor for its dispassionate presentation of homosexuality. The novel was dedicated to "J.T." Decades later, after a magazine published rumors about J.T.'s identity, Vidal confirmed they were the initials of his St. Albans-era love, James "Jimmy" Trimble III, killed in the Battle of Iwo Jima on February 29, 1945; Vidal later said that Trimble was the only person he had ever loved.

Orville Prescott, the book critic for the ''New York Times'', found ''The City and the Pillar'' so objectionable that he refused to review or allow the ''Times'' to review Vidal's next five books. In response, Vidal wrote several mystery novels the early 1950s under the pseudonym "Edgar Box". Featuring public relations man Peter Cutler Sargeant II, their success financed Vidal for more than a decade.

He wrote plays, films, and television series. Two plays, ''The Best Man'' (1960) and ''Visit to a Small Planet (1955),'' were both Broadway and film successes.

In 1956, Vidal was hired as a contract screenwriter for Metro Goldwyn Mayer. In 1959, director William Wyler needed script doctors to re-write the script for ''Ben-Hur'', originally written by Karl Tunberg. Vidal collaborated with Christopher Fry, reworking the screenplay on condition that MGM release him from the last two years of his contract. Producer Sam Zimbalist's death complicated the screenwriting credit. The Screen Writers Guild resolved the matter by listing Tunberg as sole screenwriter, denying credit to both Vidal and Fry. This decision was based on the WGA screenwriting credit system which favors original authors. Vidal later claimed in the documentary film ''The Celluloid Closet'' that in order to explain the animosity between Ben-Hur and Messala, he had inserted a gay subtext suggesting that the two had had a prior relationship, but that actor Charlton Heston was oblivious. Heston denied that Vidal contributed significantly to the script.

In the 1960s, Vidal wrote three novels. The first, ''Julian'' (1964) dealt with the apostate Roman emperor, while the second, ''Washington, D.C.'' (1967) focused on a political family during the Franklin D. Roosevelt era. The third was the satirical transsexual comedy ''Myra Breckinridge'' (1968), a variation on Vidal's familiar themes of sex, gender, and popular culture. In the novel, Vidal showcased his love of the American films of the 30s and 40s, and he resurrected interest in the careers of the forgotten players of the time including, for example, that of the late Richard Cromwell, who, he wrote, "was so satisfyingly tortured in ''The Lives of a Bengal Lancer''."

After the staging of the plays ''Weekend'' (1968) and ''An Evening With Richard Nixon'' (1972), and the publication of the novel ''Two Sisters: A Novel in the Form of a Memoir'' (1970), Vidal focused on essays and two distinct themes in his fiction. The first strain comprises novels dealing with American history, specifically with the nature of national politics. Critic Harold Bloom wrote, "Vidal's imagination of American politics...is so powerful as to compel awe." Titles in this series, the Narratives of Empire, include ''Burr'' (1973), ''1876'' (1976), ''Lincoln'' (1984), ''Empire'' (1987), ''Hollywood'' (1990), ''The Golden Age'' (2000). Another title devoted to the ancient world, ''Creation'', appeared in 1981 and then in expanded form in 2002.

The second strain consists of the comedic "satirical inventions": ''Myron'' (1974, a sequel to ''Myra Breckinridge''), ''Kalki'' (1978), ''Duluth'' (1983), ''Live from Golgotha: The Gospel according to Gore Vidal'' (1992), and ''The Smithsonian Institution'' (1998).

Vidal occasionally returned to writing for film and television, including the television movie ''Gore Vidal's Billy the Kid'' with Val Kilmer and the mini-series ''Lincoln''. He also wrote the original draft for the controversial film ''Caligula'', but later had his name removed when director Tinto Brass and actor Malcolm McDowell rewrote the script, changing the tone and themes significantly. The producers later made an attempt to salvage some of Vidal's vision in the film's post-production.

Essays and memoirs

Vidal is—at least in the U.S.—even more respected as an essayist than as a novelist. The critic John Keats praised him as "[the twentieth] century's finest essayist." Even an occasionally hostile critic like Martin Amis admits, "Essays are what he is good at ... [h]e is learned, funny and exceptionally clear-sighted. Even his blind spots are illuminating."

For six decades, Gore Vidal has applied himself to a wide variety of sociopolitical, sexual, historical, and literary themes. In 1987, Vidal wrote the essays titled ''Armageddon?'', exploring the intricacies of power in contemporary America. He pilloried the incumbent president Ronald Reagan as a "triumph of the embalmer's art." In 1993, he won the National Book Award for his collection of essays, ''United States (1952–1992)'', the citation noting: "Whatever his subject, he addresses it with an artist's resonant appreciation, a scholar's conscience, and the persuasive powers of a great essayist." A subsequent collection of essays, published in 2000, is ''The Last Empire''. Since then, he has published such self-described "pamphlets" as ''Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace'', ''Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta'', and ''Imperial America'', critiques of American expansionism, the military-industrial complex, the national security state, and the George W. Bush administration. Vidal also wrote an historical essay about the U.S.'s founding fathers, ''Inventing a Nation''. In 1995, he published a memoir ''Palimpsest'', and in 2006 its follow-up volume, ''Point to Point Navigation''. Earlier that year, Vidal also published ''Clouds and Eclipses: The Collected Short Stories.''

Because of his matter-of-fact treatment of same-sex relations in such books as ''The City and The Pillar'', Vidal is often seen as an early champion of sexual liberation. ''Sexually Speaking: Collected Sex Writings'', a representative sampling of his views, contains literary and cultural essays. Focusing on, in his view, the anti-sexual heritage of Judeo-Christianity, irrational and destructive sex laws, feminism, heterosexism, homophobia, gay liberation and pornography, the essays frequently return to a favorite Vidal motif: the fluidity of sexual identity. Vidal argues that "there are no homosexual people, only homosexual acts." Given the diversity of human desire, Vidal resists any effort to categorize him as exclusively "homosexual"—either as writer or human being.

In 2005, Jay Parini was appointed as Vidal's literary executor.

Acting and popular culture

In the 1960s, Vidal moved to Italy; he gave a cameo appearance in Federico Fellini's film ''Roma''. In 1992, Vidal appeared in the film ''Bob Roberts'' (starring Tim Robbins) and has appeared in other films, notably ''Gattaca'', ''With Honors'', and ''Igby Goes Down''. Vidal has voiced himself on both ''The Simpsons'' and ''Family Guy'' and appeared on the ''Da Ali G Show'', where Ali G (intentionally) mistakes him for Vidal Sassoon. He provided the narrative for the Royal National Theatre's production of Brecht's Mother Courage in the autumn of 2009.

Vidal was portrayed in ''Amelia'' (2009), as a child, by Canadian actor William Cuddy, and in ''Infamous'' (2006), the story of Truman Capote, as a young adult, by American actor Michael Panes.

Political views and activities

Besides his politician grandfather, Vidal has other connections with the Democratic Party: his mother, Nina, married Hugh D. Auchincloss, Jr., who later was stepfather of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. Gore Vidal is a fifth cousin of Jimmy Carter. Vidal may be a distant cousin of Al Gore.

As a political activist, in 1960, Gore Vidal was an unsuccessful Democratic candidate for Congress, losing an election in New York's 29th congressional district, a traditionally Republican district on the Hudson River, encompassing all of Columbia, Dutchess, Greene, Schoharie, and Ulster Counties to J. Ernest Wharton, by a margin of 57% to 43%. Campaigning with a slogan of "You'll get more with Gore", he received the most votes any Democrat in 50 years received in that district. Among his supporters were Eleanor Roosevelt, Paul Newman, and Joanne Woodward; the latter two, longtime friends of Vidal's, campaigned for him and spoke on his behalf.

On the December 15, 1971 taping of ''The Dick Cavett Show'', with Janet Flanner, Norman Mailer allegedly head-butted Vidal during an altercation prior to their appearance on the show.

From 1970 to 1972, Vidal was one of the chairmen of the People's Party. In 1971, he wrote an article in ''Esquire'' advocating consumer advocate Ralph Nader for president in the 1972 election.

In 1982 he campaigned against incumbent Governor Jerry Brown for the Democratic primary election to the United States Senate from California and this was documented in the film, ''Gore Vidal: The Man Who Said No'' directed by Gary Conklin. Vidal lost to Brown in the primary election.

Frequently identified with Democratic causes and personalities, Vidal wrote in the 1970s: }} Despite this, Vidal has said "I think of myself as a conservative." Vidal has a protective, almost proprietary attitude toward his native land and its politics: "My family helped start [this country]", he has written, "and we've been in political life... since the 1690s, and I have a very possessive sense about this country." At a 1999 lecture in Dublin, Vidal said:

He has suggested that President Roosevelt deliberately provoked the Japanese to attack the U.S. at Pearl Harbor to facilitate American entry to the war, and believes FDR had advance knowledge of the attack. During an interview in the 2005 documentary ''Why We Fight'', Vidal asserts that during the final months of World War II, the Japanese had tried to surrender to the United States, to no avail. He said, "They were trying to surrender all that summer, but Truman wouldn't listen, because Truman wanted to drop the bombs." When the interviewer asked why, Vidal replied, "To show off. To frighten Stalin. To change the balance of power in the world. To declare war on communism. Perhaps we were starting a pre-emptive world war."

During domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh's imprisonment, Vidal corresponded with McVeigh and concluded that he bombed the federal building as retribution for the FBI's role in the 1993 Branch Davidian Compound massacre in Waco, Texas.

Vidal was a member of the advisory board of the World Can't Wait organization, a left-wing organization seeking to repudiate the Bush administration's program, and advocating the impeachment of George W. Bush for war crimes.

In 1997, Vidal was one of 34 celebrities to sign an open letter to then-German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, published as a newspaper advertisement in the ''International Herald Tribune'', which protested the treatment of Scientologists in Germany.

Vidal contributed an article to ''The Nation'' in which he expressed support for Democratic Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, citing him as "the most eloquent of the lot" and that Kucinich "is very much a favorite out there in the amber fields of grain".

In May 2008, Vidal proclaimed to Esquire magazine: "Everything’s wrong on Wikipedia."

In April 2009, Vidal accepted appointment to the position of honorary president of the American Humanist Association, succeeding Kurt Vonnegut.

On September 30, 2009, ''The Times'' of London published a lengthy interview with him headlined "We’ll have a dictatorship soon in the US - The grand old man of letters Gore Vidal claims America is ‘rotting away’ — and don’t expect Barack Obama to save it", which brings up-to-date his views on his own life, and a variety of political subjects.

Vidal versus Buckley

In 1968, ABC News invited Vidal and William F. Buckley, Jr. to be political analysts of the Republican and Democratic presidential conventions. Verbal and nearly physical combat ensued. After days of mutual bickering, their debates devolved to vitriolic, ad hominem attacks. During discussions of the 1968 Democratic National Convention protests, the men were arguing about freedom of speech in regards to American protesters displaying a Viet Cong flag when Vidal told Buckley to "shut up a minute" and, in response to Buckley's reference to "pro-Nazi" protesters, went on to say "As far as I'm concerned, the only sort of pro-crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself." The visibly livid Buckley replied, "Now listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi, or I'll sock you in the goddamn face and you'll stay plastered." After an interruption by anchor and facilitator Howard K. Smith, the men continued to discuss the topic in a less hostile manner. Buckley later expressed regret for having called Vidal a "queer," but nonetheless described Vidal as an "evangelist for bisexuality."

Later, in 1969, the feud was continued as Buckley further attacked Vidal in the lengthy essay, "On Experiencing Gore Vidal", published in the August 1969 issue of ''Esquire''. The essay is collected in ''The Governor Listeth'', an anthology of Buckley's writings of the time. In a key passage attacking Vidal as an apologist for homosexuality, Buckley wrote, "The man who in his essays proclaims the normalcy of his affliction [i.e., homosexuality], and in his art the desirability of it, is not to be confused with the man who bears his sorrow quietly. The addict is to be pitied and even respected, not the pusher."

Vidal responded in the September 1969 issue of ''Esquire'', variously characterizing Buckley as "anti-black", "anti-semitic", and a "warmonger". The presiding judge in Buckley's subsequent libel suit against Vidal initially concluded that "[t]he court must conclude that Vidal's comments in these paragraphs meet the minimal standard of fair comment. The inferences made by Vidal from Buckley's [earlier editorial] statements cannot be said to be completely unreasonable." However, Vidal also strongly implied that, in 1944, Buckley and unnamed siblings had vandalized a Protestant church in their Sharon, Connecticut, hometown after the pastor's wife had sold a house to a Jewish family. Buckley sued Vidal and ''Esquire'' for libel. Vidal counter-claimed for libel against Buckley, citing Buckley's characterization of Vidal's novel ''Myra Breckinridge'' as pornography.

The court dismissed Vidal's counter-claim; Buckley settled for $115,000 in attorney's fees and an editorial statement from ''Esquire'' magazine that they were "utterly convinced" of the untruthfulness of Vidal's assertion. However, in a letter to ''Newsweek'', the ''Esquire'' publisher stated that "the settlement of Buckley's suit against us" was not "a 'disavowal' of Vidal's article. On the contrary, it clearly states that we published that article because we believed that Vidal had a right to assert his opinions, even though we did not share them."

As Vidal's biographer, Fred Kaplan, later commented, "The court had 'not' sustained Buckley's case against ''Esquire''... [t]he court had 'not' ruled that Vidal's article was 'defamatory.' It had ruled that the case would have to go to trial ''in order to determine as a matter of fact whether or not it was defamatory.'' [italics original.] The cash value of the settlement with ''Esquire'' represented 'only' Buckley's legal expenses [not damages based on libel]... " Ultimately, Vidal bore the cost of his own attorney's fees, estimated at $75,000.

In 2003, this affair re-surfaced when ''Esquire'' published ''Esquire's Big Book of Great Writing'', an anthology that included Vidal's essay. Buckley again sued for libel, and ''Esquire'' again settled for $55,000 in attorney's fees and $10,000 in personal damages to Buckley.

After Buckley's death on February 27, 2008, Vidal summed up his impressions of his rival with the following obituary on March 20, 2008: "RIP WFB—in hell." In a June 15, 2008, interview with the ''New York Times'', Vidal was asked by Deborah Solomon, "How did you feel when you heard that Buckley died this year?" Vidal responded:

Criticism of the George W. Bush administration

Vidal was strongly critical of the George W. Bush administration, listing it among administrations he considered to have either an explicit or implicit expansionist agenda. He has described George W. Bush as "the stupidest man in the United States".

He is of the view that for several years the Bush administration and their associates aimed to control the petroleum of Central Asia (after gaining effective control of the petroleum of the Persian Gulf in 1991). In October 2006, Vidal derided NORAD for what he claimed was a conspiracy against the US public, perpetrated by an alliance of the US Air Force and the government of Canada at the time.

In May 2007, Vidal clarified his views, saying: }}

Bibliography

Essays and non-fiction

''Rocking the Boat'' (1963)

''Reflections Upon a Sinking Ship'' (1969)

''Sex, Death and Money'' (1969) (paperback compilation)

''Homage to Daniel Shays'' (1972)

''Matters of Fact and of Fiction'' (1977)

''Views from a Window'' Co-Editor (1981)

''The Second American Revolution'' (1982)

''Vidal In Venice'' (1985) ISBN 0-671-60691-3

''Armageddon?'' (1987) (UK only)

''At Home'' (1988)

''A View From The Diner's Club'' (1991) (UK only)

''Screening History'' (1992) ISBN 0-233-98803-3

''Decline and Fall of the American Empire'' (1992) ISBN 1-878825-00-3

''United States: essays 1952–1992'' (1993) ISBN 0-7679-0806-6

''Palimpsest: a memoir'' (1995) ISBN 0-679-44038-0

''Virgin Islands'' (1997) (UK only)

''The American Presidency'' (1998) ISBN 1-878825-15-1

''Sexually Speaking: Collected Sex Writings'' (1999)

''The Last Empire: essays 1992–2000'' (2001) ISBN 0-375-72639-X (there is also a much shorter UK edition)

''Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace or How We Came To Be So Hated'', Thunder's Mouth Press, 2002, (2002) ISBN 1-56025-405-X

''Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta'', Thunder's Mouth Press, (2002) ISBN 1-56025-502-1

''Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson'' (2003) ISBN 0-300-10171-6

''Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia'' (2004) ISBN 1-56025-744-X

''Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir'' (2006) ISBN 0-385-51721-1

''The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal'' (2008) ISBN 0-385-52484-6

''Gore Vidal: Snapshots in History's Glare'' (2009) ISBN 0-810-95049-9

Plays

''Visit to a Small Planet'' (1957) ISBN 0-8222-1211-0

''The Best Man'' (1960)

''On the March to the Sea'' (1960–1961, 2004)

''Romulus'' (adapted from Friedrich Dürrenmatt's 1950 play ''Romulus der Große'') (1962)

''Weekend'' (1968)

''Drawing Room Comedy'' (1970)

''An Evening with Richard Nixon'' (1970) ISBN 0-394-71869-0

''On the March to the Sea'' (2005)

Novels

''Williwaw'' (1946) ISBN 0-226-85585-6

''In a Yellow Wood'' (1947)

''The City and the Pillar'' (1948) ISBN 1-4000-3037-4

''The Season of Comfort'' (1949) ISBN 0-233-98971-4

''A Search for the King'' (1950) ISBN 0-345-25455-4

''Dark Green, Bright Red'' (1950) ISBN 0-233-98913-7 (prophecy of the Guatemala coup d'état of 1954, see "In the Lair of the Octopus" ''Dreaming War'')

''The Judgment of Paris'' (1952) ISBN 0-345-33458-2

''Messiah'' (1954) ISBN 0-14-118039-0

''A Thirsty Evil'' (1956) (short stories)

''Julian'' (1964) ISBN 0-375-72706-X

''Washington, D.C.'' (1967) ISBN 0-316-90257-8

''Myra Breckinridge'' (1968) ISBN 1125979488

''Two Sisters'' (1970) ISBN 0-434-82958-7

''Burr'' (1973) ISBN 0-375-70873-1

''Myron'' (1974) ISBN 0-586-04300-4

''1876'' (1976) ISBN 0-375-70872-3

''Kalki'' (1978) ISBN 0-14-118037-4

''Creation'' (1981) ISBN 0-349-10475-1

''Duluth'' (1983) ISBN 0-394-52738-0

''Lincoln'' (1984) ISBN 0-375-70876-6

''Empire'' (1987) ISBN 0-375-70874-X

''Hollywood'' (1990) ISBN 0-375-70875-8

''Live from Golgotha: The Gospel according to Gore Vidal'' (1992) ISBN 0-14-023119-6

''The Smithsonian Institution'' (1998) ISBN 0-375-50121-5

''The Golden Age'' (2000) ISBN 0-375-72481-8

''Clouds and Eclipses: The Collected Short Stories'' (2006) (short stories, this is the same collection as ''A Thirsty Evil'' (1956), with one previously unpublished short story – ''Clouds and Eclipses'' – added)

Screenplays

''Climax!: Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde'' (1954) (TV adaptation)

''The Catered Affair'' (1956)

''I Accuse!'' (1958)

''The Scapegoat'' (1959)

''Ben Hur'' (1959) (uncredited)

''Suddenly, Last Summer'' (1959)

''The Best Man'' (1964)

''Is Paris Burning?'' (1966)

''Last of the Mobile Hot Shots'' (1970)

''Caligula'' (1979)

''Dress Gray'' (1986)

''The Sicilian'' (1987) (uncredited)

''Billy the Kid'' (1989)

''Dimenticare Palermo'' (1989)

Works under pseudonyms

''A Star's Progress'' (aka ''Cry Shame!'') (1950) as Katherine Everard

''Thieves Fall Out'' (1953) as Cameron Kay

''Death Before Bedtime'' (1953) as Edgar Box

''Death in the Fifth Position'' (1952) as Edgar Box

''Death Likes It Hot'' (1954) as Edgar Box

Film & TV appearances

''Profile of a Writer: Gore Vidal'' – RM Productions (1979 documentary film)

''Gore Vidal: The Man Who Said No'' (1983 documentary film)

''Weekend In Wallop'' (1984)

''Vidal in Venice'' – Antelope Films for Channel Four Television (1987 documentary film)

''Bob Roberts'' – as Senator Brickley Paiste (1992 film)

''With Honors'' – Plays the pessimistic and right-wing Prof. Pitkannan (1994 film)

''The Celluloid Closet'' – (1995 documentary film)

''Gattaca'' – Plays Director Josef in science-fiction film (1997)

''The Education of Gore Vidal'' (2003) Documentary by ''Deborah Dickson'', aired in the US on ''PBS''

''Thinking XXX'' (2004 documentary)

''Da Ali G Show'' (2004 TV)

''Why We Fight'' (2005 film)

''Inside Deep Throat'' (2005 film)

''One Bright Shining Moment'' (2005 film)

''Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal's Caligula'' (2005 spoof trailer)

''Foreign Correspondent'' – with former NSW premier Bob Carr

''The U.S. Versus John Lennon'' (2006 film)

Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra concert, August 2, 2007 – Narrated Aaron Copland's Lincoln Portrait (conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas) from a wheelchair.

''The Henry Rollins Show'' (2007 TV)

"The Simpsons" episode: "Moe'N'a Lisa"

"Family Guy" episode: "Mother Tucker"

Alex Jones radio show (2006)

''Terrorstorm: Final Cut Special Edition'' (2007)

''Lateline – ABC Television Australia Interview'' (May 2, 2008)

''Democracy Now'' – interview: on the Bush Presidency, History and the "United States of Amnesia" (May 14, 2008)

''The South Bank Show'' (May 18, 2008)

''Hardtalk – BBC News'' (May 22, 2008)

''The Andrew Marr Show (May 25, 2008)

''The US is not a republic anymore'' (June, 2008)

''Zero: An Investigation Into 9/11'' (June, 2008)

''Interview on the BBC's US Presidential Election Coverage with David Dimbleby (04/11/08)

"Writer Against the Grain": Gore Vidal in conversation with Jay Parini at the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar (audio, 59:09)

''Real Time with Bill Maher'' (April 10, 2009)

''Shrink'' (2009 film)

''"Gore Vidal's America"'' on The Real News Network (December 24, 2010)

See also

Politics in fiction

References

External links

The Gore Vidal Index, by Harry Kloman

The Gore Vidal Pages

Gore Vidal New York Review of Books author profile including a list of his reviews and essays from over 40 years, along with a bibliography

Audio recording: Gore Vidal at the Key West Literary Seminar, 2009: "Writer Against the Grain"

Gore Vidal's America - Seven part interview with Gore Vidal on The Real News - (video) July 5, 2009

Gore Vidal Interview with Melvyn Bragg in ''New Statesman'' Magazine - 11 October 2010

Category:1925 births Category:Living people Category:People from Orange County, New York Category:American dramatists and playwrights Category:American essayists Category:American expatriates in Italy Category:American historical novelists Category:American humanists Category:American memoirists Category:American novelists Category:American political writers Category:American screenwriters Category:American tax resisters Category:Edgar Award winners Category:Bisexual actors Category:Bisexual writers Category:Conspiracy theorists Category:LGBT memoirists Category:American LGBT military personnel Category:LGBT screenwriters Category:LGBT writers from the United States Category:Military brats Category:People from Los Angeles, California Category:Phillips Exeter Academy alumni Category:American military personnel of World War II Category:United States Army soldiers Category:National Book Award winners Category:Postmodern writers

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Coordinates	52°2′″N23°7′″N
Name	Norman Mailer
Pseudonym	Andreas Wilson
Birth name	Norman Kingsley Mailer
Birth date	January 31, 1923
Birth place	Long Branch, New Jersey, U.S.
Death date	November 10, 2007
Death place	New York City, U.S.
Occupation	Novelist, essayist, journalist, columnist, poet, playwright
Nationality	American
Genre	Fiction, non-fiction
Influences	John Dos Passos, George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Mann, William Faulkner, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Henry James, Marcel Proust, Henry Miller
Influenced	Don DeLillo, Martin Amis, Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, Lester Bangs, Jim Morrison
Portaldisp	yes }}

Norman Kingsley Mailer (January 31, 1923 – November 10, 2007) was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director.

Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, John McPhee, and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, which superimposes the essay onto the nonfiction novel. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize twice and the National Book Award once. In 1955, Mailer, together with John Wilcock, Ed Fancher and Dan Wolf, first published ''The Village Voice'', which began as an arts and politics oriented weekly newspaper distributed in Greenwich Village. In 2005, he won the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation.

In 1992, Mailer received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. The Helmerich Award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.

Early life

Norman Kingsley Mailer was born to a well-known Jewish family in Long Branch, New Jersey. His father, Isaac Barnett Mailer, was a South African-born accountant, and his mother, Fanny Schneider, ran a housekeeping and nursing agency. Mailer's sister, Barbara, was born in 1927. His second sister, Norma, was born in 1930. Raised in Brooklyn, New York, he graduated from Boys' High School and entered Harvard University in 1939, where he studied aeronautical engineering. At Harvard, he became interested in writing and published his first story at the age of 18, winning ''Story'' magazine's college contest in 1941. As an undergraduate, he was a member of The Signet Society. After graduating in 1943, he was drafted into the U.S. Army. In World War II, he served in the Philippines with the 112th Cavalry. He was not involved in much combat and completed his service as a cook, but the experience provided enough material for ''The Naked and the Dead''.

Literary career

Novels

In 1948, while continuing his studies at the Sorbonne in Paris, Mailer published ''The Naked and the Dead,'' (1948) based on his military service in World War II. A ''New York Times'' best seller for 62 weeks, it was hailed by many as one of the best American wartime novels and named one of the "one hundred best novels in English language" by the Modern Library.

''Barbary Shore'' (1951) was a surreal parable of Cold War left politics set in a Brooklyn rooming-house. His 1955 novel ''The Deer Park'' drew on his experiences working as a screenwriter in Hollywood in 1949–50. It was initially rejected by seven publishers due to its purportedly sexual content before being published by Putnam's.

In the tradition of Dickens and Dostoevsky, Mailer wrote his fourth novel, ''An American Dream'', as a serial in ''Esquire'' magazine over eight months (January to August 1964), publishing the first chapter only two months after he wrote it. In March 1965, Dial Press published a revised version. His editor was E. L. Doctorow. The novel received mixed reviews, but was a best seller. Joan Didion praised it in a review in ''National Review'' (April 20, 1965) and John W. Aldridge did the same in ''Life '' (March 19, 1965), while Elizabeth Hardwick panned it in ''Partisan Review'' (spring 1965). Except for a brief period, the novel has never gone out of print.

In 1980, ''The Executioner's Song''—Mailer's novelization of the life and death of murderer Gary Gilmore—won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Mailer spent a longer time writing ''Ancient Evenings''—his novel of Egypt in the XX dynasty (about 1100 B.C.E.)—than any of his other books, working on it off and on from 1972 until 1983. It was also a bestseller, although reviews were generally negative.

''Harlot's Ghost'', Mailer's longest novel (1310 pages), appeared in 1991. It is an exploration of the unspoken dramas of the CIA from the end of WWII to 1965. He performed a huge amount of research for the novel, which is still on CIA reading lists. He ended the novel with the words "To be continued," and planned to write a sequel, titled ''Harlot's Grave''. But other projects intervened and he never wrote it. ''Harlot's Ghost'' sold well.

His final novel, ''The Castle in the Forest'', which focused on Hitler's childhood, reached number five on the ''Times'' best-seller list after publication in January 2007, and received stronger reviews than any of his books since ''The Executioner's Song.'' ''Castle'' was intended to be the first volume of a trilogy, but Mailer died several months after it was completed. ''The Castle in the Forest'' was awarded a Bad Sex in Fiction Award by the ''Literary Review'' magazine.

Mailer wrote over 40 books. He published 11 novels over a 59-year span.

The New Journalism

From the mid-1950s, Mailer became known for his counter-cultural essays. In 1955, he co-founded ''The Village Voice'' for which he wrote a column from January to April 1956. Mailer's famous essay "The White Negro" (1957) "analyzes and partly defends the moral radicalism of the outsider and hipster." It is one of the most anthologized, and controversial, essays of the postwar period.

In 1960, Mailer wrote "Superman Comes to the Supermarket" for ''Esquire'' magazine, an account of the emergence of John F. Kennedy during the Democratic party convention. The essay was an important breakthrough for the New Journalism of the nineteen sixties. Mailer's contributions to the New Journalism include major books such as ''The Armies of the Night'' (1968—awarded a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award); ''Miami and the Siege of Chicago'' (1968); ''Of a Fire on the Moon'' (1971); and ''The Prisoner of Sex'' (1971). Hallmarks of these works are a highly subjectivized style and a greater application of techniques from fiction-writing than common in journalism.

Mailer wrote a ''Playboy'' article about Elmo Henderson, a boxer who had defeated Muhammad Ali in 1972. In the 1970s Henderson filed a $1 million lawsuit against Mailer and ''Playboy''. The magazine and Mailer lost the lawsuit.

The Big Screen

In addition to his experimental fiction and nonfiction novels, Mailer produced a play version of ''The Deer Park'' (staged at the Theatre De Lys in Greenwich Village in 1967), and in the late 1960s directed a number of improvisational avant-garde films in a Warhol style, including ''Maidstone'' (1970), which includes a spontaneous and brutal brawl between Norman T. Kingsley, played by Mailer, and Kingsley's brother, played by Rip Torn. Mailer received a head injury when Torn struck him with a hammer. In 1987, he adapted and directed a film version of his novel ''Tough Guys Don't Dance'', starring Ryan O'Neal and Isabella Rossellini, which has become a minor camp classic.

Political activism

A number of Mailer's nonfiction works, such as ''The Armies of the Night'' and ''The Presidential Papers'', are political. He covered the Republican and Democratic National Conventions in 1960, 1964, 1968, 1972, 1992, and 1996, although his account of the 1996 Democratic convention has never been published. In the early 1960s he was fixated on the figure of President John F. Kennedy, whom he regarded as an "existential hero." In the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s and 1970s his work mingled autobiography, social commentary, history, fiction, and poetry in a formally original way that influenced the development of New Journalism. In October 1967, he was arrested for his involvement in an anti-Vietnam War demonstration at the Pentagon. In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.

At the December 15, 1971, taping of ''The Dick Cavett Show'', with Janet Flanner and Gore Vidal, Mailer, annoyed with a less-than-stellar review by Vidal of ''Prisoner of Sex'', apparently headbutted Vidal and traded insults with him backstage. As the show began taping, a visibly belligerent Mailer, who admitted he had been drinking, goaded Vidal and Cavett into trading insults with him on air and continually referred to his "greater intellect". He openly taunted and mocked Vidal (who responded in kind), finally earning the ire of Flanner, who announced that the discussion had become "extremely boring", telling Mailer "You act as if you're the only people here." As Cavett made jokes comparing Mailer's intellect to his ego, Mailer stated "Why don't you look at your question sheet and ask your question?", to which Cavett responded "Why don't you fold it 5 ways and shove it where the moon don't shine."

The headbutting and later on-air altercation was described by Mailer himself in his essay "Of a Small and Modest Malignancy, Wicked and Bristling with Dots." The Wikipedia article about landmark episodes of the show states:

A 1971 interview with Norman Mailer was not going well. Mailer moved his chair away from the other guests (Gore Vidal and Janet Flanner), and Cavett joked that "perhaps you'd like two more chairs to contain your giant intellect?" Mailer replied "I'll take the two chairs if you'll all accept finger-bowls." Mailer later said to Cavett "Why don't you look at your question sheet and ask your question?", to which Cavett replied "Why don't you fold it five ways and put it where the moon don't shine?"

A long laugh ensued, after which Mailer asked Cavett if he had come up with that line and Cavett replied "I have to tell you a quote from Tolstoy?".

In 1980, Mailer spearheaded convicted killer Jack Abbott's successful bid for parole. In 1977, Abbott had read about Mailer's work on ''The Executioner's Song'' and wrote to Mailer, offering to enlighten the author about Abbott's time behind bars and the conditions he was experiencing. Mailer, impressed, helped to publish ''In the Belly of the Beast'', a book on life in the prison system consisting of Abbott's letters to Mailer. Once paroled, Abbott committed a murder in New York City six weeks after his release, stabbing to death 22-year-old Richard Adan. Consequently, Mailer was subject to criticism for his role. In a 1992 interview with the ''Buffalo News'', he conceded that his involvement was "another episode in my life in which I can find nothing to cheer about or nothing to take pride in."

In 1989, Mailer joined with a number of other prominent authors in publicly expressing support for colleague Salman Rushdie in the wake of the ''fatwa'' calling for Rushdie's assassination issued by Iran's Islamic government for his having authored ''The Satanic Verses''.

In 2003, in a speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, just before the invasion of Iraq, Mailer said: "Fascism is more of a natural state than democracy. To assume blithely that we can export democracy into any country we choose can serve paradoxically to encourage more fascism at home and abroad. Democracy is a state of grace that is attained only by those countries who have a host of individuals not only ready to enjoy freedom but to undergo the heavy labor of maintaining it."

From 1980 until his death in 2007, he contributed to Democratic Party candidacies for political office.

Mayoral campaign

In 1969, at the suggestion of Gloria Steinem, his friend the political essayist Noel Parmentel and others, he ran unsuccessfully in the Democratic Party primary for Mayor of New York City, allied with columnist Jimmy Breslin (who ran for City Council President), proposing New York City secession and creating a 51st state. Mailer "foresaw the city, its independence secured, splintering into townships and neighborhoods, with their own school systems, police departments, housing programs, and governing philosophies." Their slogan was "throw the rascals in". Mailer was endorsed by libertarian economist Murray Rothbard, who "believed that 'smashing the urban government apparatus and fragmenting it into a myriad of constituent fragments' offered the only answer to the ills plaguing American cities," and called Mailer's campaign “the most refreshing libertarian political campaign in decades.” He came in fourth in a field of five. Looking back on the campaign, journalist and historian Theodore White called it “one of the most serious campaigns run in the United States in the last five years. . . . [H]is campaign was considered and thoughtful, the beginning of an attempt to apply ideas to a political situation."

Biographical subjects

His biographical subjects included Pablo Picasso, Muhammad Ali, Gary Gilmore and Lee Harvey Oswald, and Marilyn Monroe.

His 1973 ''Marilyn'' was particularly controversial. Arthur Miller, playwright and former husband to Marilyn Monroe, wrote in his 1987 autobiography Timebends of Mailer's biography that, "[Marilyn] was himself in drag, acting out his own Hollywood fantasies of fame and sex unlimited and power."

In its final chapter he stated that Monroe was murdered by agents of the FBI and CIA who resented her supposed affair with Robert F. Kennedy. Despite its problems, the biography was enormously successful, selling more copies than any of his works except ''The Naked and the Dead''. It stayed in print for decades, but was out of print in the United States.

(Two works he co-wrote presented imagined words and thoughts in Monroe's voice; these were the 1980 book ''Of Women and Their Elegance'' and the 1986 play ''Strawhead'', which was produced off Broadway with his daughter, Kate Mailer, starring.)

Personal life

Marriages and children

Norman Mailer was married six times and had nine children. He fathered eight children by his various wives and also raised and informally adopted Norris' son from another marriage, Matthew.

Norman's first marriage was in 1944, to Beatrice Silverman, whom he divorced in 1952. They had one child, Susan.

Mailer married his second wife, Adele Morales, in 1954. They had two daughters, Danielle and Elizabeth. Mailer was violent to his wife. He punched her in the stomach when she was six months pregnant, and coerced her to have group sex with his friends. In 1960, Mailer stabbed Adele with a penknife after a party, nearly killing her. He cut through her breast, only just missing her heart. Then he stabbed her in the back. As she lay there, haemorrhaging, one man reached down to help her. He snapped: "Get away from her. Let the bitch die." He was involuntarily committed to Bellevue Hospital for 17 days; his wife would not press charges, and he later pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of assault, and was given a suspended sentence. While in the short term, Morales made a physical recovery, in 1997 she published a memoir of their marriage entitled ''The Last Party'', which recounted the violence and its aftermath. This incident has been a focal point for feminist critics of Mailer, who point to themes of sexual violence in his work.

His third wife, whom he married in 1962, and divorced in 1963, was the British heiress and journalist Lady Jeanne Campbell (1929–2007), the only daughter of Ian Campbell, 11th Duke of Argyll and a granddaughter of the press baron Lord Beaverbrook. The couple had a daughter, Kate Mailer, who is an actress.

His fourth marriage, in 1963, was to Beverly Bentley, a former model turned actress. She was the mother of his producer son Michael Mailer and his actor son Stephen Mailer. They divorced in 1980.

His fifth wife was Carol Stevens, a jazz singer whom he married on November 7, 1980, and divorced in Haiti on November 8, 1980, thereby legitimating their daughter Maggie, born in 1971.

His sixth and last wife, whom he married in 1980, was Norris Church Mailer (née Barbara Davis, 1949–2010), an art teacher. In her autobiography ''A Ticket to the Circus'', Norris Church recounts of a rape and a miscarriage. They had one son together, John Buffalo Mailer, a writer and actor, and Mailer informally adopted Matthew Norris, her son by her first husband, Larry Norris. Living in Brooklyn, New York and Provincetown, Massachusetts with Mailer, Church worked as a model, wrote and painted.

Works with children

In 2005, Mailer co-wrote a book with his youngest child, John Buffalo Mailer, entitled ''The Big Empty''.

Mailer appeared in an episode of ''Gilmore Girls'' entitled "Norman Mailer, I'm Pregnant!" with his son Stephen Mailer.

Death and legacy

Mailer died of acute renal failure on the morning of November 10, 2007, a month after undergoing lung surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, New York.

The papers of the two-time Pulitzer Prize author may be found at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin.

In 2008, Carole Mallory sold seven boxes of documents and photographs to Harvard University, Norman Mailer's Alma Mater. They contain extracts of her letters, books and journals.

Mailer was widely quoted, e.g. "Culture is worth a little risk" (see link below to "Wikiquotes": Mailer quotes).

Cultural References

In the comedy ''Sleeper'', Woody Allen remarks that Mailer "donated his ego to the Harvard Medical School." He's referenced in the Red Hot Chili Peppers song "Animal Bar" in the lyrics "Ever loving mug of Mr. Norman Mailer".

Selected bibliography

Fiction

Novels

''The Naked and the Dead''. New York: Rinehart, 1948.

''Barbary Shore''. New York: Rinehart, 1951.

''The Deer Park''. New York: Putnam's, 1955.

''An American Dream''. New York: Dial, 1965.

''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' New York: Putnam's, 1967.

''The Executioner's Song'' Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1979.

''Of Women and Their Elegance''. New York, Simon and Schuster, 1980

''Ancient Evenings''. Boston: Little, Brown, 1983.

''Tough Guys Don't Dance''. New York: Random House, 1984.

''Harlot's Ghost''. New York: Random House, 1991.

''The Gospel According to the Son''. New York: Random House, 1997.

''The Castle in the Forest''. New York: Random House, 2007.

Plays

''The Deer Park: A Play''. New York: Dial, 1967.

Short Stories

''The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer''. New York: Dell, 1967.

Non-fiction

General Non-fiction

''The Armies of the Night''. New York: New American Library, 1968.

''Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968''. New York: New American Library, 1968.

''Of a Fire on the Moon''. Boston: Little, Brown, 1970.

''The Prisoner of Sex''. Boston: Little, Brown, 1971.

''St. George and The Godfather''. New York: Signet Classics, 1972.

''The Faith of Graffiti''. New York: Praeger, 1974.

''The Fight''. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1975.

''Of a Small and Modest Malignancy, Wicked and Bristling with Dots''. Northridge, CA: Lord John Press, 1980.

''Why Are We At War?''. New York: Random House, 2003 ISBN 978-0812971118

''The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing''. New York: Random House, 2003.

''The Big Empty: Dialogues on Politics, Sex, God, Boxing, Morality, Myth, Poker and Bad Conscience in America''. New York: Nation Books, 2006

''On God: An Uncommon Conversation''. New York: Random House, 2007 ISBN 978-1400067329

Essay Collections

''Advertisements for Myself''. New York: Putnam's, 1959.

''The Presidential Papers''.New York: Putnam, 1963.

''Cannibals and Christians''. New York: Dial, 1966.

''Pieces and Pontifications''. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1982.

Biographies

''Marilyn: A Biography''. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1973.

''Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man: An Interpretive Biography''. Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995.

''Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery''. New York: Random House, 1996 ISBN 978-0679425359

Famous Essays and Articles

"The White Negro". San Francisco: City Lights, 1957.

References

Further reading

''Norman Mailer'' by Michael K. Glenday. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995.

''Radical Fictions and the Novels of Norman Mailer'' by Nigel Leigh. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990.

''Norman Mailer: Works and Days'' by J. Michael and Donna P. Lennon. Westport, MA: Sligo Press, 2000. Comprehensive, annotated primary and secondary bibliography with life chronology.

''Norman Mailer: The Man and His Work,'' edited by Robert F. Lucid. Boston: Little, Brown. The first collection of essays on Mailer.

''Norman Mailer'' by Philip Bufithis. New York: Ungar, 1978. Perhaps the most readable and reliable study of Mailer's early work.

''Acts of Regeneration: Allegory and Archetype in the Works of Norman Mailer'' by Robert J. Begiebing. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1980. Fine discussion of Mailer's "heroic consciousness."

''The Enduring Vision of Norman Mailer'' by Barry H. Leeds. Bainbridge, WA: Pleasure Boat Studio, 2002.

''Political Fiction and the American Self'' by John Whalen-Bridge. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998. Subtle examination of Mailer's dual aptitude of representing and resisting American mythologies.

''Critical Essays on Norman Mailer,'' edited by J.Michael Lennon: Boston, G.K.Hall and Co., 1986.

''Norman Mailer,'' by Richard Poirier. New York: Viking,1972. One of the best studies of Mailer's writing, tracking his career through the early Eighties.

''Norman Mailer'' by Richard Jackson Foster. University of Minnesota Press, 1968. Pamphlet.

''The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer'' by Barry H. Leeds, New York University Press,1969.

''Norman Mailer Revisited'' by Robert Merrill. Twayne, 1992. Contains perhaps the best analysis of ''The Executioner's Song''

''Mailer: His Life and Times,'' edited by Peter Manso. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985. Highly readable, but controversial "oral" biography of Mailer created by cross-cutting interviews with friends, enemies, acquaintances, relatives, wives of Mailer and Mailer himself.

''Conversations with Norman Mailer,'' edited by J. Michael Lennon. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1988.

''Norman Mailer: A Collection of Critical Essays'' edited by Leo Braudy. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972. Contains useful insights on ''Miami and the Siege of Chicago.''

''Existential Battles: The Growth of Norman Mailer'' by Laura Adams. Athens: University of Ohio Press, 1976. Good discussion of early narrators.

''Time to Murder and Create: The Contemporary Novel in Crisis'' by John W. Aldridge. New York: David McKay, 1966. Contains Aldridge's important essay on ''An American Dream.''

''The Portable Beat Reader,'' edited by Ann Charters, Penguin Books. New York. 1992. ISBN 0-670-83885-3 (hc); ISBN 0-14-015102-8 (pbk). Contains "The White Negro."

''The Norman Mailer Review,'' edited by Phillip Sipiora. New periodical co-sponsored by the University of South Florida and The Norman Mailer Society (www.normanmailersociety.com).

The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture: Francis Irby Gwaltney http://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=3034

Van A. Tyson http://www.atkinschronicle.com/vantyson.htm

External links

Transcript of interview with Ramona Koval, Edinburgh International Book Festival, August 2000 broadcast on ''The Book Show'', ABC Radio National, November 12, 2007

The Norman Mailer Society

"Superman Comes to the Supermarket," article by Norman Mailer on John F. Kennedy, Esquire magazine, November 1960

Sunday New York Times review by Lee Siegel of ''The Castle in the Forest''

Norman Mailer on American Masters (PBS Broadcast)

Norman Mailer: The American (Documentary)

Norman Mailer's writing on The Huffington Post

A conversation with Norman Mailer (Minnesota Public Radio)

Norman Mailer and Günter Grass interviewed by Andrew O'Hagan at The New York Public Library, June 2007

Norman Mailer speech at UC Berkeley Vietnam Teach-In, 1965 (RealAudio) (via UC Berkeley Media Resources Center)

Joyce Carol Oates on Norman Mailer

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Coordinates	52°2′″N23°7′″N
name	Dick Cavett
birth name	Richard Alva Cavett
birth date	November 19, 1936
birth place	Gibbon, Nebraska, U.S.
spouse	Carrie Nye (1964-2006; her death)
active	1959–present

}}

Richard Alva "Dick" Cavett (born November 19, 1936) is a former American television talk show host known for his conversational style and in-depth discussion of issues. Cavett appeared regularly on nationally broadcast television in the United States in five consecutive decades, the 1960s through the 2000s.

In recent years, Cavett has written a blog for the ''New York Times'', promoted DVDs of his former shows, and hosted replays of his classic TV interviews with Groucho Marx, Katharine Hepburn, and others on Turner Classic Movies channel.

Early life

Dick Cavett was born in Nebraska, but sources differ as to the specific town, locating his birthplace in either Gibbon, where his family lived, or nearby Kearney, the location of the nearest hospital. His mother Erabel "Era" (née Richards) and his father Alva B. Cavett both worked as educators. When asked by Lucille Ball on his own show about his heritage, he said he was "Scottish, Irish, English, and possibly partly French, and, and uh, a dose of German." He also mentioned that one grandfather "came over" from England, and the other from Wales. Cavett's grandparents all lived in Grand Island, Nebraska. His paternal grandparents were Alva A. Cavett and Gertrude Pinsch. His paternal grandfather was from Diller, Nebraska and his paternal grandmother was an immigrant from Aachen, Germany. His maternal grandparents were the Rev. R. R. and Etta Mae Richards. Rev. Richards was from Carmarthen, Wales and was a Baptist minister who served parishes across central Nebraska.

Cavett's parents taught in Comstock, Gibbon, and Grand Island, where Cavett started kindergarten at Wasmer Elementary School. Three years later, both of his parents landed teaching positions in Lincoln, Nebraska, where Cavett completed his education at Capitol, Prescott, and Irving schools and Lincoln High School. When Cavett was ten, his mother died of cancer at age 36. His father subsequently married Dorcas Deland, also an educator, originally from Alliance, Nebraska. On September 24, 1995 Lincoln Public Schools dedicated the new Dorcas C. and Alva B. Cavett Elementary School in their honor.

In eighth grade, Cavett directed a live Saturday-morning radio show sponsored by the Junior League and played the title role in ''The Winslow Boy''. One of his high-school classmates was actress Sandy Dennis. Cavett was elected state president of the student council in high school, and was a gold-medalist at the state gymnastics championship.

Before leaving for college, he worked as a caddy at the Lincoln Country Club. He also began performing magic shows for $35 a night under the tutelage of Gene Gloye. In 1952 Cavett attended the convention of the International Brotherhood of Magicians in St. Louis and won the Best New Performer trophy. Around the same time, he met fellow magician Johnny Carson, eleven years his senior, who was doing a magic act at a church in Lincoln.

While attending Yale University, Cavett played in and directed dramas on the campus radio station, WYBC, and appeared in Yale Drama productions. In his senior year, he changed his major from English to Drama. He also took advantage of any opportunity to meet stars, routinely going to shows in New York to hang around stage doors or venture backstage. He would go so far as to carry a copy of ''Variety'' or an appropriate piece of company stationery in order to look inconspicuous while sneaking backstage or into a TV studio. Cavett took many odd jobs ranging from store detective to label-typist for a Wall Street firm, and as a copy boy at ''Time Magazine''.

Marriage

At Yale School of Drama, Cavett met his future wife, Caroline Nye McGeoy (known professionally as Carrie Nye), a native of Greenwood, Mississippi. After graduation, the two acted in summer theater in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and Cavett worked for two weeks in a local lumberyard in order to buy an engagement ring. On June 4, 1964, they were married in New York. Their marriage was at times tumultuous, but they remained married until Nye's death on July 14, 2006.

In 2010, Cavett married business author Martha Rogers, Ph.D. in a small ceremony in New Orleans, Louisiana.

''The Tonight Show''

In 1960, Cavett was living in a three-room, fifth-floor walk-up on West 89th Street in Manhattan for $51 a month.

He was cast in a film by the Signal Corps, but further jobs were not forthcoming. He was an extra on ''The Phil Silvers Show,'' a TV remake of ''Body and Soul'', and ''Playhouse 90'' ("The Hiding Place"). He briefly revived his magic act while working as a typist and as a mystery shopper in department stores. Meanwhile, Nye landed several Broadway roles.

Cavett was a copyboy (gofer) at ''Time'' when he read a newspaper item about Jack Paar, then host of ''The Tonight Show.'' The article described Paar's concerns about his opening monologue and constant search for material. Cavett wrote some jokes, put them into a ''Time'' envelope, and went to the RCA Building. He ran into Paar in a hallway and handed him the envelope. He then went to sit in the studio audience. During the show, Paar worked in some of the lines Cavett had fed him. Afterward, Cavett got into an elevator with Paar, who invited him to contribute more jokes. Within weeks, Cavett was hired, originally as talent coordinator. Cavett wrote for Paar the famous line, "Here they are, Jayne Mansfield," as an introduction for the buxom actress. Cavett appeared on the show in 1961, interpreting Miss Universe of 1961, Marlene Schmidt of Germany.

While at ''Time,'' Cavett wrote a letter to Stan Laurel. The two later met at Laurel's apartment in Hollywood. Later the same day, Cavett wrote a tribute that Paar read on the show, which Laurel saw and appreciated. Cavett visited Laurel a few more times, up to three weeks before Laurel's death.

In his capacity as talent coordinator for ''The Tonight Show'', Cavett was sent to the Blue Angel nightclub to see Woody Allen's act, and immediately afterward struck up a friendship. The very next day, the funeral of playwright George S. Kaufman was held at the Frank E. Campbell funeral home. Allen could not attend, but Cavett did, where he met Groucho Marx in an anteroom. From the funeral, Cavett followed Marx (who later told Cavett that Kaufman was "his personal god") three blocks up Fifth Avenue to the Plaza Hotel, where Marx invited him to lunch. Years later, Cavett gave the introduction to Marx's one-man show, ''An Evening with Groucho Marx'' at Carnegie Hall, and began by saying, "I can't believe that I know Groucho Marx."

Cavett continued with ''The Tonight Show'' as a writer after Johnny Carson assumed hosting duties. For Carson he wrote the line, "Having your taste criticized by Dorothy Kilgallen is like having your clothes criticized by Emmett Kelly." He even appeared to do a gymnastics routine on the pommel horse on the show. After departing ''The Tonight Show'', Cavett wrote for Jerry Lewis's ill-fated talk show, for three times the money. He returned to ''The Tonight Show'', however, when Marx was interim host for Carson in July 1964.

Years later, when he was a guest on ''The Tonight Show'', Carson told Cavett that his favorite joke Cavett wrote for him was the humorous caption to a newspaper photo of Aristotle Onassis looking at the home of Buster Keaton, which he was considering purchasing: "Aristotle Contemplating the Home of Buster."

Stand-up comic

Cavett began a brief career as a stand-up comic in 1964 at the Bitter End in Greenwich Village. His manager was Jack Rollins, who later became famous as the producer of Woody Allen's films.

Drunken female heckler: I pay your salary, buddy, with my hard-earned money.Cavett: And I'm tempted to guess at your profession.

His most famous line from this period may have been the following:

He also played Mr. Kelly's in Chicago and the Hungry i in San Francisco. In San Francisco, he met Lenny Bruce, about whom he said:

In 1965, Cavett did some commercial voiceovers, including a series of mock interviews with Mel Brooks for Ballantine beer. In the next couple of years he appeared on game shows, including ''What's My Line''. He wrote for Merv Griffin and appeared on Griffin's talk show several times, and then on ''The Ed Sullivan Show''.

In 1968, after the premiere of the international film ''Candy'', Cavett went to a party at the Americana Hotel, where those who had just seen the film were being interviewed for TV. The exchange was cut from the broadcast.

After doing ''The Star and the Story'', a rejected television pilot with Van Johnson, Cavett hosted a special, ''Where It's At'', for Bud Yorkin and Norman Lear.

In 1968 Cavett was hired by ABC to host ''This Morning''. According to a ''New Yorker'' article, the show was too sophisticated for a morning audience, and ABC first moved the show to prime time, and subsequently to a late-night slot opposite Johnny Carson's ''The Tonight Show''.

''The Dick Cavett Show''

Intermittently since 1968, Cavett has been host of his own talk show, in various formats and on various television and radio networks:

ABC (1968–1974)

CBS (1975)

PBS (1977–1982)

USA (1985–1986)

ABC (1986–1987)

CNBC (1989–1996)

Olympia Broadcasting (syndicated radio show, 1986–1990)

Turner Classic Movies (2006–2007)

Cavett has been nominated for at least ten Emmy Awards and has won three. In 1970, he co-hosted the Emmy Awards Show (from Carnegie Hall in New York) with Bill Cosby (from Century Plaza in Los Angeles). His most popular talk show was his ABC program, which ran from 1969 to 1974. From 1962 to 1992, ''The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson'' was arguably the most popular of late night variety and talk shows. Unlike many contemporary shows, Cavett managed to remain on the air for five years. Although his shows did not attract a wide audience, remaining in third place in the ratings behind Carson and Merv Griffin, he earned a reputation as "the thinking man's talk show host" and received favorable reviews from critics. As a talk show host, Cavett has been noted for his ability to listen to his guests and engage them in intellectual conversation. Clive James described Cavett "as a true sophisticate with a daunting intellectual range" and "the most distinguished talk-show host in America." He is also known for his ability to remain calm and mediate between contentious guests, and for his deep, resonant voice, unusual for a man of his stature (5'7").

His show often focussed on controversial people or subjects, often pairing guests with opposing views on social or political issues, such as Jim Brown and Lester Maddox.

One particularly controversial show from June 1971 featured a debate between future senator and presidential candidate John Kerry and fellow veteran John O'Neill over the Vietnam War. O'Neill had been approached by the Nixon administration to work through the ''Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace'' to counter Kerry's influence on the public. The debate went poorly for the pro-war side, so angering President Nixon that he is heard discussing the incident on the Watergate tapes, saying, "Well, is there any way we can screw him [Cavett]? That's what I mean. There must be ways." To which H. R. Haldeman, White House Chief of Staff, answered, "We've been trying to."

Cavett himself, asked during a Question and Answer segment with his audience in the late '60s why he wore long sideburns, replied, "It's a form of mild protest. Sort of like boiling my draft card."

Cavett also hosted many popular musicians, both in interview and performance, such as Sly Stone, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. Several of his Emmy Award nominations and one Emmy Award were for Outstanding Musical or Variety Series, and in 2005 Shout Factory released a selection of performances and interviews on a three DVD set, ''The Dick Cavett Show: Rock Icons'', showcasing interviews of and performances by musicians who appeared on the Dick Cavett show from 1969 to 1974.

Clips from his TV shows have been used in films, for example ''Annie Hall'' (1977), ''Forrest Gump'' (1994), ''Apollo 13'' (1995), and ''Frequency'' (2000). He also holds the distinction of being the only famous person to actually interact with the title character of ''Forrest Gump'' without the aid of archive footage or computer trickery. Cavett donned a wig and makeup was applied to make him appear as his 1971 self, and he was filmed with Tom Hanks on a recreated set (though archive footage of John Lennon from Cavett's show was digitally added).

Cavett was surprised at footage from his TV show appearing in ''Apollo 13''. He said at the time of the film's release, "I'm happily enjoying a movie, and suddenly I'm in it."

Bouts with depression

Cavett has openly discussed his bouts with clinical depression, an illness that first affected him during his freshman year at Yale. According to an interview published in a 1992 issue of ''People'' magazine, Cavett contacted Dr. Nathan Kline in 1975 seeking treatment. Kline prescribed antidepressant medication, which according to Cavett was successful in treating his depression.

In 1980 Cavett suffered what he characterized as his "biggest depressive episode." While on board a Concorde prior to take off, Cavett broke out into a sweat and became agitated. After he was removed from the plane, Cavett was taken to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York City, where he later underwent electroconvulsive therapy. Regarding this method of treatment Cavett is quoted as saying, "In my case, ECT was miraculous. My wife was dubious, but when she came into my room afterward, I sat up and said, 'Look who's back among the living.' It was like a magic wand."

He was also the subject of a 1993 video produced by the Depression and Related Affective Disorders Association called ''A Patient's Perspective''.

In 1997 Cavett was sued by producer James Moskovitz for breach of contract after failing to show up for a nationally syndicated radio program (also called ''The Dick Cavett Show''). Cavett's lawyer, Melvyn Leventhal, asserted at the time that Cavett left due to a manic-depressive episode. The case was later dropped.

Other work

Cavett has co-authored two books with Christopher Porterfield: ''Cavett'' (1974), his autobiography, and ''Eye on Cavett'' (1983). Cavett currently writes a blog, published by the ''New York Times'', entitled "Talk Show: Dick Cavett Speaks Again."

He appeared as himself in various other TV shows, including episodes of ''The Odd Couple'', ''Cheers'', ''Kate & Allie'', and ''The Simpsons'' episode ''Homie the Clown''; in Robert Altman's ''HealtH'' (1980), and ''A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors'' (1987). In Tim Burton's ''Beetlejuice'', he played a rare bit part as a character other than himself. Cavett often appeared on television quiz and game shows; he appeared on ''What's My Line?'', ''To Tell the Truth'', ''Password'', ''The $25,000 Pyramid'' and made a special appearance on ''Wheel of Fortune'' in 1989 during their week of shows at Radio City Music Hall, walking on stage after someone solved the puzzle "DICK CAVETT." In 1974, Cavett's company, Daphne Productions, co-produced with Don Lipp Productions a short-lived ABC game show, ''The Money Maze'', although Cavett's name did not appear on the credits.

Cavett was the narrator (on camera and off) for the HBO documentary series ''Time Was''. Each episode covered a decade, ranging from the 1920s to the 1970s, and relied on stock file footage and photographs. The show originally aired in November 1979 and ran for six months with a new show each month.

Cavett also hosted a documentary series for HBO in the early '80s titled ''Remember When...'' that examined changes in American culture over time.

In April, 1981, Cavett traveled to Stockholm, Sweden, to interview the pop group ABBA on the occasion of their tenth anniversary as a group. The special, titled ''Dick Cavett Meets ABBA'', was taped by the Swedish TV network SVT and was broadcast mostly in Europe.

From November 15, 2000, to January 6, 2002, he played the narrator in a Broadway revival of ''The Rocky Horror Show''. He also had a brief stint as the narrator/old man in the Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim's ''Into The Woods''.

Dick Cavett is featured in the 2003 documentary ''From the Ashes: The Life and Times of Tick Hall'' about the fire that destroyed his Montauk home and his effort to rebuild it.

Cavett's signature tune has long been a trumpet version of the vocalise "Glitter and Be Gay" from Leonard Bernstein's ''Candide''. The tune was first played at the midpoint of his ABC late-night show, and later became the theme of his PBS show. The tune is also played as he walks on stage during guest appearances on other talk shows.

Cavett was present when actor Marlon Brando broke the jaw of paparazzo photographer Ron Galella on June 12, 1973. Galella had followed Cavett and Brando to a restaurant after the taping of ''The Dick Cavett Show'' in New York City.

In 2008 Cavett entered the Iraq war dispute with a ''New York Times'' blog entry criticizing General David Petraeus, stating "I can’t look at Petraeus — his uniform ornamented like a Christmas tree with honors, medals and ribbons — without thinking of the great Mort Sahl at the peak of his brilliance." Cavett went on to recall Sahl's expressed contempt of General Westmoreland's display of medals, and criticized Petraeus for not speaking in plain language.

Bibliography

''Cavett'' by Dick Cavett and Christopher Porterfield, Bantam Books, August 1974. ISBN 0-15-116130-5

''Eye on Cavett'' by Dick Cavett and Christopher Porterfield, Arbor House, 1983. ISBN 0-87795-463-1

''Talk Show'' by Dick Cavett, Times Books, 2010. ISBN 0-8050-9195-5

References

External links

An interview with Dick Cavett, Feb 2011

Dick Cavett at TVGuide.com

Dick Cavett talks about his love of magic with Dodd Vickers at MagicNewswire.com

"Talk Show: Dick Cavett Speaks Again" New York Times Blog

"Discussion of Dick Cavett's unique talent on MetaFilter"

Category:1936 births Category:American male artistic gymnasts Category:American comedians Category:American game show hosts Category:American stand-up comedians Category:American television talk show hosts Category:American people of English descent Category:American comedians of Irish descent Category:American people of Irish descent Category:American people of German descent Category:American people of Scottish descent Category:Emmy Award winners Category:Living people Category:Entertainers from Nebraska Category:People from Buffalo County, Nebraska Category:People with bipolar disorder Category:Yale School of Drama alumni Category:Writers from Nebraska Category:Writers from New York City

de:Dick Cavett fr:Dick Cavett

Coordinates	52°2′″N23°7′″N
Region	Western philosophy
Era	20th / 21st-century philosophy
Color	#B0C4DE
Name	Noam Chomsky
Other names	Avram Noam Chomsky
Birth date	December 07, 1928
Birth place	Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Alma mater	University of Pennsylvania (BA 1949, MA 1951, PhD 1955)
School tradition	Generative linguistics, Analytic philosophy
Main interests	Linguistics PsychologyPhilosophy of languagePhilosophy of mind Politics Ethics
Alma mater	University of Pennsylvania
Religion	Atheist
Notable ideas	Generative grammar, universal grammar, transformational grammar, government and binding, X-bar theory, Chomsky hierarchy, context-free grammar, principles and parameters, Minimalist program, language acquisition device, poverty of the stimulus, Chomsky–Schützenberger theorem, Chomsky Normal Form, propaganda model
Influences	Dwight Macdonald, Pāṇini, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Dewey, Mikhail Bakunin, Karl Marx, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Adam Smith, Zellig Harris, Rudolf Rocker, Immanuel Kant, René Descartes, George Orwell, C. West Churchman, Alan Turing, W. V. O. Quine
Influenced	Niall McLaren, Colin McGinn, Edward Said, Christopher Hitchens, Steven Pinker, Peter Ludlow, Tanya Reinhart, Morris Halle, Gilbert Harman, Jerry Fodor, Howard Lasnik, Robert Fisk, Neil Smith, Ray Jackendoff, Norbert Hornstein, Jean Bricmont, Marc Hauser, Norman Finkelstein, Robert Lees, Hugo Chavez, Mark Baker, Julian Boyd, Ray C. Dougherty, Derek Bickerton, Amy Goodman, Michael Albert }}

Avram Noam Chomsky (; born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and a major figure of analytic philosophy. His work has influenced fields such as computer science, mathematics, and psychology.

Chomsky is credited as the creator or co-creator of the Chomsky hierarchy, the universal grammar theory, and the Chomsky–Schützenberger theorem.

Ideologically identifying with anarchism and libertarian socialism, Chomsky is known for his critiques of U.S. foreign policy and contemporary capitalism, and he has been described as a prominent cultural figure. His media criticism has included ''Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media'' (1988), co-written with Edward S. Herman, an analysis articulating the propaganda model theory for examining the media.

According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index in 1992, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar from 1980 to 1992, and was the eighth most cited source overall. Chomsky is the author of over 100 books.

Life and career

Chomsky was born on the morning of December 7, 1928, to Jewish parents in the affluent East Oak Lane neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of noted professor of Hebrew at Gratz College and IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) member William Chomsky (1896–1977), a native of Ukraine. His mother, Elsie Chomsky (née Simonofsky)—a native of what is present-day Belarus—grew up in the United States and, unlike her husband, spoke "ordinary New York English". Chomsky's parents' first language was Yiddish, but Chomsky said it was "taboo" in his family to speak it. Although Chomsky's mother was part of the radical activism in the 1930s, he was influenced largely by his uncle who, having never passed 4th grade, owned a newsstand that acted as an "intellectual center [where] professors of this and that argu[ed] all night". Chomsky was influenced also by being a part of a Hebrew-based, Zionist organization, as well as by hanging around anarchist bookstores.

He describes his family as living in a sort of "Jewish ghetto", split into a "Yiddish side" and "Hebrew side", with his family aligning with the latter and bringing him up "immersed in Hebrew culture and literature", though he means more a "cultural ghetto than a physical one". Chomsky also describes tensions he experienced with Irish Catholics and German Catholics and anti-semitism in the mid-1930s. He recalls "beer parties" celebrating the fall of Paris to the Nazis. In a discussion of the irony of his staying in the 1980s in a Jesuit House in Central America, Chomsky explained that during his childhood, "We were the only Jewish family around. I grew up with a visceral fear of Catholics. They're the people who beat you up on your way to school. So I knew when they came out of that building down the street, which was the Jesuit school, they were raving anti-Semites. So childhood memories took a long time to overcome."

Chomsky remembers the first article he wrote was at age 10 while a student at Oak Lane Country Day School about the threat of the spread of fascism, following the fall of Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War. From the age of 12 or 13, he identified more fully with anarchist politics.

A graduate of Central High School of Philadelphia, Chomsky began studying philosophy and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1945, taking classes with philosophers such as C. West Churchman and Nelson Goodman and linguist Zellig Harris. Harris's teaching included his discovery of transformations as a mathematical analysis of language structure (mappings from one subset to another in the set of sentences). Chomsky referred to the morphophonemic rules in his 1951 master's thesis—''The Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew''—as transformations in the sense of Carnap's 1938 notion of rules of transformation (vs. rules of formation), and subsequently reinterpreted the notion of grammatical transformations in a very different way from Harris, as operations on the productions of a context-free grammar (derived from Post production systems). Harris's political views were instrumental in shaping those of Chomsky. Chomsky earned a BA in 1949 and an MA in 1951.

In 1949, he married linguist Carol Schatz. They remained married for 59 years until her death from cancer in December 2008. The couple had two daughters, Aviva (b. 1957) and Diane (b. 1960), and a son, Harry (b. 1967). With his wife Carol, Chomsky spent time in 1953 living in HaZore'a, a kibbutz in Israel. Asked in an interview whether the stay was "a disappointment" Chomsky replied, "No, I loved it"; however, he "couldn't stand the ideological atmosphere" and "fervent nationalism" in the early 1950s at the kibbutz, with Stalin being defended by many of the left-leaning kibbutz members who chose to paint a rosy image of future possibilities and contemporary realities in the USSR. Chomsky notes seeing many positive elements in the commune-like living of the kibbutz, in which parents and children lived together in separate houses, and when asked whether there were "lessons that we have learned from the history of the kibbutz", responded, that in "some respects, the kibbutzim came closer to the anarchist ideal than any other attempt that lasted for more than a very brief moment before destruction, or that was on anything like a similar scale. In these respects, I think they were extremely attractive and successful; apart from personal accident, I probably would have lived there myself – for how long, it's hard to guess."

Chomsky received his PhD in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955. He conducted part of his doctoral research during four years at Harvard University as a Harvard Junior Fellow. In his doctoral thesis, he began to develop some of his linguistic ideas, elaborating on them in his 1957 book ''Syntactic Structures'', one of his best-known works in linguistics.

Chomsky joined the staff of MIT in 1955 and in 1961 was appointed full professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics (now the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy). From 1966 to 1976 he held the Ferrari P. Ward Professorship of Modern Languages and Linguistics, and in 1976 he was appointed Institute Professor. As of 2010, Chomsky has taught at MIT continuously for 55 years.

In February 1967, Chomsky became one of the leading opponents of the Vietnam War with the publication of his essay, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals", in ''The New York Review of Books''. This was followed by his 1969 book, ''American Power and the New Mandarins,'' a collection of essays that established him at the forefront of American dissent. His far-reaching criticisms of U.S. foreign policy and the legitimacy of U.S. power have raised controversy he is frequently sought out for his views by publications and news outlets internationally. In 1977 he delivered the Huizinga Lecture in Leiden, the Netherlands, under the title: ''Intellectuals and the State''.

Chomsky has received death threats because of his criticisms of U.S. foreign policy. He was also on a list of planned targets created by Theodore Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber; during the period that Kaczynski was at large, Chomsky had all of his mail checked for explosives. He states that he often receives undercover police protection, in particular while on the MIT campus, although he does not agree with the police protection.

Chomsky resides in Lexington, Massachusetts, and travels often, giving lectures on politics.

Contributions to linguistics

Chomskyan linguistics, beginning with his ''Syntactic Structures'', a distillation of his '' Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory'' (1955, 75), challenges structural linguistics and introduces transformational grammar. This approach takes utterances (sequences of words) to have a syntax characterized by a formal grammar; in particular, a context-free grammar extended with transformational rules.

Perhaps his most influential and time-tested contribution to the field, is the claim that modeling knowledge of language using a formal grammar accounts for the "productivity" or "creativity" of language. In other words, a formal grammar of a language can explain the ability of a hearer-speaker to produce and interpret an infinite number of utterances, including novel ones, with a limited set of grammatical rules and a finite set of terms. He has always acknowledged his debt to Pāṇini for his modern notion of an explicit generative grammar although it is also related to rationalist ideas of a priori knowledge.

It is a popular misconception that Chomsky proved that language is entirely innate and discovered a "universal grammar" (UG). In fact, Chomsky simply observed that while a human baby and a kitten are both capable of inductive reasoning, if they are exposed to exactly the same linguistic data, the human child will always acquire the ability to understand and produce language, while the kitten will never acquire either ability. Chomsky labeled whatever the relevant capacity the human has which the cat lacks the "language acquisition device" (LAD) and suggested that one of the tasks for linguistics should be to figure out what the LAD is and what constraints it puts on the range of possible human languages. The universal features that would result from these constraints are often termed "universal grammar" or UG.

The Principles and Parameters approach (P&P;)—developed in his Pisa 1979 Lectures, later published as ''Lectures on Government and Binding'' (LGB)—makes strong claims regarding universal grammar: that the grammatical principles underlying languages are innate and fixed, and the differences among the world's languages can be characterized in terms of parameter settings in the brain (such as the pro-drop parameter, which indicates whether an explicit subject is always required, as in English, or can be optionally dropped, as in Spanish), which are often likened to switches. (Hence the term principles and parameters, often given to this approach.) In this view, a child learning a language need only acquire the necessary lexical items (words, grammatical morphemes, and idioms), and determine the appropriate parameter settings, which can be done based on a few key examples.

Proponents of this view argue that the pace at which children learn languages is inexplicably rapid, unless children have an innate ability to learn languages. The similar steps followed by children all across the world when learning languages, and the fact that children make certain characteristic errors as they learn their first language, whereas other seemingly logical kinds of errors never occur (and, according to Chomsky, should be attested if a purely general, rather than language-specific, learning mechanism were being employed), are also pointed to as motivation for innateness.

More recently, in his Minimalist Program (1995), while retaining the core concept of "principles and parameters," Chomsky attempts a major overhaul of the linguistic machinery involved in the LGB model, stripping from it all but the barest necessary elements, while advocating a general approach to the architecture of the human language faculty that emphasizes principles of economy and optimal design, reverting to a derivational approach to generation, in contrast with the largely representational approach of classic P&P.;

Chomsky's ideas have had a strong influence on researchers of the language acquisition in children, though many researchers in this area such as Elizabeth Bates and Michael Tomasello argue very strongly against Chomsky's theories, and instead advocate emergentist or connectionist theories, explaining language with a number of general processing mechanisms in the brain that interact with the extensive and complex social environment in which language is used and learned.

His best-known work in phonology is ''The Sound Pattern of English'' (1968), written with Morris Halle (and often known as simply ''SPE''). This work has had a great significance for the development in the field. While phonological theory has since moved beyond "SPE phonology" in many important respects, the SPE system is considered the precursor of some of the most influential phonological theories today, including autosegmental phonology, lexical phonology and optimality theory. Chomsky no longer publishes on phonology.

Generative grammar

The Chomskyan approach towards syntax, often termed generative grammar, studies grammar as a body of knowledge possessed by language users. Since the 1960s, Chomsky has maintained that much of this knowledge is innate, implying that children need only learn certain parochial features of their native languages. The innate body of linguistic knowledge is often termed universal grammar. From Chomsky's perspective, the strongest evidence for the existence of Universal Grammar is simply the fact that children successfully acquire their native languages in so little time. Furthermore, he argues that there is an enormous gap between the linguistic stimuli to which children are exposed and the rich linguistic knowledge they attain (the "poverty of the stimulus" argument). The knowledge of Universal Grammar would serve to bridge that gap.

Chomsky's theories have been immensely influential within linguistics, but they have also received criticism. One recurring criticism of the Chomskyan variety of generative grammar is that it is Anglocentric and Eurocentric, and that often linguists working in this tradition have a tendency to base claims about Universal Grammar on a very small sample of languages, sometimes just one. Initially, the Eurocentrism was exhibited in an overemphasis on the study of English. However, hundreds of different languages have now received at least some attention within Chomskyan linguistic analyses. In spite of the diversity of languages that have been characterized by UG derivations, critics continue to argue that the formalisms within Chomskyan linguistics are Anglocentric and misrepresent the properties of languages that are different from English. Thus, Chomsky's approach has been criticized as a form of linguistic imperialism. In addition, Chomskyan linguists rely heavily on the intuitions of native speakers regarding which sentences of their languages are well-formed. This practice has been criticized on general methodological grounds. Some psychologists and psycholinguists, though sympathetic to Chomsky's overall program, have argued that Chomskyan linguists pay insufficient attention to experimental data from language processing, with the consequence that their theories are not psychologically plausible. Other critics (see language learning) have questioned whether it is necessary to posit Universal Grammar to explain child language acquisition, arguing that domain-general learning mechanisms are sufficient.

Today there are many different branches of generative grammar; one can view grammatical frameworks such as head-driven phrase structure grammar, lexical functional grammar and combinatory categorial grammar as broadly Chomskyan and generative in orientation, but with significant differences in execution.

Chomsky hierarchy

Chomsky is famous for investigating various kinds of formal languages and whether or not they might be capable of capturing key properties of human language. His Chomsky hierarchy partitions formal grammars into classes, or groups, with increasing expressive power, i.e., each successive class can generate a broader set of formal languages than the one before. Interestingly, Chomsky argues that modeling some aspects of human language requires a more complex formal grammar (as measured by the Chomsky hierarchy) than modeling others. For example, while a regular language is powerful enough to model English morphology, it is not powerful enough to model English syntax. In addition to being relevant in linguistics, the Chomsky hierarchy has also become important in computer science (especially in compiler construction and automata theory). Indeed, there is an equivalence between the Chomsky language hierarchy and the different kinds of automata. Thus theorems about languages are often dealt with as either languages (grammars) or automata.

An alternate method of dealing with languages is based upon Formal Power series. Formal Power series as well as the relationship between languages and semi-groups continued to occupy M. P. Schützenberger at the Sorbonne. Formal Power Series are similar to the Taylor Series one encounters in a course on Calculus, and is especially useful for languages where words (terminal symbols) are commutative.

Contributions to psychology

Chomsky's work in linguistics has had profound implications for modern psychology. For Chomsky, linguistics is a branch of cognitive psychology; genuine insights in linguistics imply concomitant understandings of aspects of mental processing and human nature. His theory of a universal grammar was seen by many as a direct challenge to the established behaviorist theories of the time and had major consequences for understanding how children learn language and what, exactly, the ability to use language is.

In 1959, Chomsky published an influential critique of B.F. Skinner's ''Verbal Behavior'', a book in which Skinner offered a theoretical account of language in functional, behavioral terms. He defined "Verbal Behavior" as learned behavior that has characteristic consequences delivered through the learned behavior of others. This makes for a view of communicative behaviors much larger than that usually addressed by linguists. Skinner's approach focused on the circumstances in which language was used; for example, asking for water was functionally a different response than labeling something as water, responding to someone asking for water, etc. These functionally different kinds of responses, which required in turn separate explanations, sharply contrasted both with traditional notions of language and Chomsky's psycholinguistic approach. Chomsky thought that a functionalist explanation restricting itself to questions of communicative performance ignored important questions. (Chomsky—Language and Mind, 1968). He focused on questions concerning the operation and development of innate structures for syntax capable of creatively organizing, cohering, adapting and combining words and phrases into intelligible utterances.

In the review Chomsky emphasized that the scientific application of behavioral principles from animal research is severely lacking in explanatory adequacy and is furthermore particularly superficial as an account of human verbal behavior because a theory restricting itself to external conditions, to "what is learned," cannot adequately account for generative grammar. Chomsky raised the examples of rapid language acquisition of children, including their quickly developing ability to form grammatical sentences, and the universally creative language use of competent native speakers to highlight the ways in which Skinner's view exemplified under-determination of theory by evidence. He argued that to understand human verbal behavior such as the creative aspects of language use and language development, one must first postulate a genetic linguistic endowment. The assumption that important aspects of language are the product of universal innate ability runs counter to Skinner's radical behaviorism.

Chomsky's 1959 review has drawn fire from a number of critics, the most famous criticism being that of Kenneth MacCorquodale's 1970 paper ''On Chomsky’s Review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior'' (''Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior,'' volume 13, pages 83–99). MacCorquodale's argument was updated and expanded in important respects by Nathan Stemmer in a 1990 paper, ''Skinner's Verbal Behavior, Chomsky's review, and mentalism'' (''Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior,'' volume 54, pages 307–319). These and similar critiques have raised certain points not generally acknowledged outside of behavioral psychology, such as the claim that Chomsky did not possess an adequate understanding of either behavioral psychology in general, or the differences between Skinner's behaviorism and other varieties. Consequently, it is argued that he made several serious errors. On account of these perceived problems, the critics maintain that the review failed to demonstrate what it has often been cited as doing. As such, it is averred that those most influenced by Chomsky's paper probably either already substantially agreed with Chomsky or never actually read it. The review has been further critiqued for misrepresenting the work of Skinner and others, including by quoting out of context. Chomsky has maintained that the review was directed at the way Skinner's variant of behavioral psychology "was being used in Quinean empiricism and naturalization of philosophy."

It has been claimed that Chomsky's critique of Skinner's methodology and basic assumptions paved the way for the "cognitive revolution", the shift in American psychology between the 1950s through the 1970s from being primarily behavioral to being primarily cognitive. In his 1966 ''Cartesian Linguistics'' and subsequent works, Chomsky laid out an explanation of human language faculties that has become the model for investigation in some areas of psychology. Much of the present conception of how the mind works draws directly from ideas that found their first persuasive author of modern times in Chomsky.

There are three key ideas. First is that the mind is "cognitive", or that the mind actually contains mental states, beliefs, doubts, and so on. Second, he argued that most of the important properties of language and mind are innate. The acquisition and development of a language is a result of the unfolding of innate propensities triggered by the experiential input of the external environment. The link between human innate aptitude to language and heredity has been at the core of the debate opposing Noam Chomsky to Jean Piaget at the Abbaye de Royaumont in 1975 (''Language and Learning. The Debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky,'' Harvard University Press, 1980). Although links between the genetic setup of humans and aptitude to language have been suggested at that time and in later discussions, we are still far from understanding the genetic bases of human language. Work derived from the model of selective stabilization of synapses set up by Jean-Pierre Changeux, Philippe Courrège and Antoine Danchin, and more recently developed experimentally and theoretically by Jacques Mehler and Stanislas Dehaene in particular in the domain of numerical cognition lend support to the Chomskyan "nativism". It does not, however, provide clues about the type of rules that would organize neuronal connections to permit language competence. Subsequent psychologists have extended this general "nativist" thesis beyond language. Lastly, Chomsky made the concept of "modularity" a critical feature of the mind's cognitive architecture. The mind is composed of an array of interacting, specialized subsystems with limited flows of inter-communication. This model contrasts sharply with the old idea that any piece of information in the mind could be accessed by any other cognitive process (optical illusions, for example, cannot be "turned off" even when they are known to be illusions).

Approach to science

Chomsky sees science as a straightforward search for explanation, and rejects the views of it as a catalog of facts or mechanical explanations. In this light, the majority of his contributions to science have been frameworks and hypotheses, rather than "discoveries."

As such, he considers certain so-called post-structuralist or postmodern critiques of logic and reason to be nonsensical:

I have spent a lot of my life working on questions such as these, using the only methods I know of; those condemned here as "science", "rationality," "logic," and so on. I therefore read the papers with some hope that they would help me "transcend" these limitations, or perhaps suggest an entirely different course. I'm afraid I was disappointed. Admittedly, that may be my own limitation. Quite regularly, "my eyes glaze over" when I read polysyllabic discourse on the themes of poststructuralism and postmodernism; what I understand is largely truism or error, but that is only a fraction of the total word count. True, there are lots of other things I don't understand: the articles in the current issues of math and physics journals, for example. But there is a difference. In the latter case, I know how to get to understand them, and have done so, in cases of particular interest to me; and I also know that people in these fields can explain the contents to me at my level, so that I can gain what (partial) understanding I may want. In contrast, no one seems to be able to explain to me why the latest post-this-and-that is (for the most part) other than truism, error, or gibberish, and I do not know how to proceed.

Although Chomsky believes that a scientific background is important to teach proper reasoning, he holds that science in general is "inadequate" to understand complicated problems like human affairs:

Science talks about very simple things, and asks hard questions about them. As soon as things become too complex, science can’t deal with them... But it’s a complicated matter: Science studies what’s at the edge of understanding, and what’s at the edge of understanding is usually fairly simple. And it rarely reaches human affairs. Human affairs are way too complicated.

Debates

Chomsky has been known to vigorously defend and debate his views and opinions, in philosophy, linguistics, and politics. He has had notable debates with Jean Piaget, Michel Foucault, William F. Buckley, Jr., Christopher Hitchens, George Lakoff, Richard Perle, Hilary Putnam, Willard Quine, and Alan Dershowitz, to name a few. In response to his speaking style being criticized as boring, Chomsky said that "I'm a boring speaker and I like it that way.... I doubt that people are attracted to whatever the persona is.... People are interested in the issues, and they're interested in the issues because they are important." "We don't want to be swayed by superficial eloquence, by emotion and so on."

Political views

Chomsky has stated that his "personal visions are fairly traditional anarchist ones, with origins in the Enlightenment and classical liberalism" and he has praised libertarian socialism. Although Chomsky tries to avoid the ambiguity of labels, his political views are often characterized in news accounts as "leftist" or "left-wing," and he has described himself as an anarcho-syndicalist. He is a member of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy and the Industrial Workers of the World international union. He published a book on anarchism titled ''Chomsky on Anarchism'', published by the anarchist book collective AK Press in 2006.

Chomsky has engaged in political activism all of his adult life and expressed opinions on politics and world events, which are widely cited, publicized and discussed. Chomsky has in turn argued that his views are those the powerful do not want to hear and for this reason he is considered an American political dissident.

Chomsky asserts that authority, unless justified, is inherently illegitimate and that the burden of proof is on those in authority. If this burden can't be met, the authority in question should be dismantled. Authority for its own sake is inherently unjustified. An example given by Chomsky of a legitimate authority is that exerted by an adult to prevent a young child from wandering into traffic. He contends that there is little moral difference between chattel slavery and renting one's self to an owner or "wage slavery". He feels that it is an attack on personal integrity that undermines individual freedom. He holds that workers should own and control their workplace, a view held (as he notes) by the Lowell Mill Girls.

Chomsky has strongly criticized the foreign policy of the United States. He claims double standards in a foreign policy preaching democracy and freedom for all while allying itself with non-democratic and repressive organizations and states such as Chile under Augusto Pinochet and argues that this results in massive human rights violations. He often argues that America's intervention in foreign nations, including the secret aid given to the Contras in Nicaragua, an event of which he has been very critical, fits any standard description of terrorism, including "official definitions in the US Code and Army Manuals in the early 1980s." Before its collapse, Chomsky also condemned Soviet imperialism; for example in 1986 during a question/answer following a lecture he gave at Universidad Centroamericana in Nicaragua, when challenged about how he could "talk about North American imperialism and Russian imperialism in the same breath," Chomsky responded: "One of the truths about the world is that there are two superpowers, one a huge power which happens to have its boot on your neck; another, a smaller power which happens to have its boot on other people's necks. I think that anyone in the Third World would be making a grave error if they succumbed to illusions about these matters."

Regarding the death of Osama bin Laden, Chomsky stated: "We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush's compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a 'suspect' but uncontroversially the 'decider' who gave the orders to commit the 'supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole' (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, [and] the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region."

He has argued that the mass media in the United States largely serve as a "bought priesthood" of the U.S. government and U.S.-based corporations, with the three intertwined through common interests. In a famous reference to Walter Lippmann, Chomsky along with his coauthor Edward S. Herman has written that the American media manufactures consent among the public. Chomsky has condemned the 2010 US Supreme Court ''Citizens United'' ruling revoking the limits on campaign finance, calling it a "corporate takeover of democracy."

Chomsky opposes the U.S. global "war on drugs", claiming its language is misleading, and refers to it as "the war on certain drugs." He favors drug policy reform, in education and prevention rather than military or police action as a means of reducing drug use. In an interview in 1999, Chomsky argued that, whereas crops such as tobacco receive no mention in governmental exposition, other non-profitable crops, such as marijuana are attacked because of the effect achieved by persecuting the poor. He has stated:

U.S. domestic drug policy does not carry out its stated goals, and policymakers are well aware of that. If it isn't about reducing substance abuse, what is it about? It is reasonably clear, both from current actions and the historical record, that substances tend to be criminalized when they are associated with the so-called dangerous classes, that the criminalization of certain substances is a technique of social control.

Chomsky is critical of the American "state capitalist" system and big business, he describes himself as a socialist, specifically an anarcho-syndicalist, and is critical of "authoritarian" communist branches of socialism. He also believes that socialist values exemplify the rational and morally consistent extension of original unreconstructed classical liberal and radical humanist ideas to an industrial context. He believes that society should be highly organized and based on democratic control of communities and work places. He believes that the radical humanist ideas of his two major influences, Bertrand Russell and John Dewey, were "rooted in the Enlightenment and classical liberalism, and retain their revolutionary character."

Chomsky has stated that he believes the United States remains the "greatest country in the world", a comment that he later clarified by saying, "Evaluating countries is senseless and I would never put things in those terms, but that some of America's advances, particularly in the area of free speech, that have been achieved by centuries of popular struggle, are to be admired." He has also said "In many respects, the United States is the freest country in the world. I don't just mean in terms of limits on state coercion, though that's true too, but also in terms of individual relations. The United States comes closer to classlessness in terms of interpersonal relations than virtually any society."

Chomsky objects to the criticism that anarchism is inconsistent with support for government welfare, stating in part:

One can, of course, take the position that we don't care about the problems people face today, and want to think about a possible tomorrow. OK, but then don't pretend to have any interest in human beings and their fate, and stay in the seminar room and intellectual coffee house with other privileged people. Or one can take a much more humane position: I want to work, today, to build a better society for tomorrow – the classical anarchist position, quite different from the slogans in the question. That's exactly right, and it leads directly to support for the people facing problems today: for enforcement of health and safety regulation, provision of national health insurance, support systems for people who need them, etc. That is not a sufficient condition for organizing for a different and better future, but it is a necessary condition. Anything else will receive the well-merited contempt of people who do not have the luxury to disregard the circumstances in which they live, and try to survive.

Chomsky holds views that can be summarized as anti-war but not strictly pacifist. He prominently opposed the Vietnam War and most other wars in his lifetime. He expressed these views with tax resistance and peace walks. In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. He published a number of articles about the war in Vietnam, including "The Responsibility of Intellectuals". He maintains that U.S. involvement in World War II to defeat the Axis powers was probably justified, with the caveat that a preferable outcome would have been to end or prevent the war through earlier diplomacy. He believes that the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were "among the most unspeakable crimes in history".

Chomsky has made many criticisms of the Israeli government, its supporters, the United States' support of the government and its treatment of the Palestinian people, arguing that " 'supporters of Israel' are in reality supporters of its moral degeneration and probable ultimate destruction" and that "Israel's very clear choice of expansion over security may well lead to that consequence." Chomsky disagreed with the founding of Israel as a Jewish state, saying, "I don't think a Jewish or Christian or Islamic state is a proper concept. I would object to the United States as a Christian state." Chomsky hesitated before publishing work critical of Israeli policies while his parents were alive, because he "knew it would hurt them" he says, "mostly because of their friends, who reacted hysterically to views like those expressed in my work." On May 16, 2010, Israeli authorities detained Chomsky and ultimately refused his entry to the West Bank via Jordan. A spokesman for the Israeli Prime Minister indicated that the refusal of entry was simply due to a border guard who "overstepped his authority" and a second attempt to enter would likely be allowed. Chomsky disagreed, saying that the Interior Ministry official who interviewed him was taking instructions from his superiors. Chomsky maintained that based on the several hours of interviewing, he was denied entry because of the things he says and because he was visiting a university in the West Bank but no Israeli universities.

Chomsky has a broad view of free-speech rights, especially in the mass media, and opposes censorship. He has stated that "with regard to freedom of speech there are basically two positions: you defend it vigorously for views you hate, or you reject it and prefer Stalinist/fascist standards". With reference to the United States diplomatic cables leak, Chomsky suggested that "perhaps the most dramatic revelation ... is the bitter hatred of democracy that is revealed both by the U.S. Government -- Hillary Clinton, others -- and also by the diplomatic service." Chomsky refuses to take legal action against those who may have libeled him and prefers to counter libels through open letters in newspapers. One notable example of this approach is his response to an article by Emma Brockes in ''The Guardian'' which alleged he denied the existence of the Srebrenica massacre. Chomsky's complaint prompted The Guardian to publish an apologetic correction and to withdraw the article from the paper's website.

Chomsky has frequently stated that there is no connection between his work in linguistics and his political views and is generally critical of the idea that competent discussion of political topics requires expert knowledge in academic fields. In a 1969 interview, he said regarding the connection between his politics and his work in linguistics:

I still feel myself that there is a kind of tenuous connection. I would not want to overstate it but I think it means something to me at least. I think that anyone's political ideas or their ideas of social organization must be rooted ultimately in some concept of human nature and human needs.

Some critics have accused Chomsky of hypocrisy when, in spite of his political criticism of American and European military imperialism, early research at the institution (MIT) where he did his linguistic research had been substantially funded by the American military. Chomsky makes the argument that because he has received funding from the U.S. military, he has an even greater responsibility to criticize and resist its immoral actions.

He is also an outspoken advocate against the use of the death penalty and has spoken against the execution of Steven Woods.

I think the death penalty is a crime no matter what the circumstances, and it is particularly awful in the Steven Woods case. I strongly oppose the execution of Steven Woods on September 13, 2011.

Influence in other fields

''Chomskyan'' models have been used as a theoretical basis in several other fields. The Chomsky hierarchy is often taught in fundamental computer science courses as it confers insight into the various types of formal languages. This hierarchy can also be discussed in mathematical terms and has generated interest among mathematicians, particularly combinatorialists. Some arguments in evolutionary psychology are derived from his research results.

The 1984 Nobel Prize laureate in Medicine and Physiology, Niels K. Jerne, used Chomsky's generative model to explain the human immune system, equating "components of a generative grammar ... with various features of protein structures". The title of Jerne's Stockholm Nobel lecture was "The Generative Grammar of the Immune System".

Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who was the subject of a study in animal language acquisition at Columbia University, was named after Chomsky in reference to his view of language acquisition as a uniquely human ability.

Famous computer scientist Donald Knuth admits to reading Syntactic Structures during his honeymoon and being greatly influenced by it. "...I must admit to taking a copy of Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures along with me on my honeymoon in 1961 ... Here was a marvelous thing: a mathematical theory of language in which I could use a computer programmer's intuition!".

Another focus of Chomsky's political work has been an analysis of mainstream mass media (especially in the United States), its structures and constraints, and its perceived role in supporting big business and government interests.

Edward S. Herman and Chomsky's book ''Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media'' (1988) explores this topic in depth, presenting their "propaganda model" of the news media with numerous detailed case studies demonstrating it. According to this propaganda model, more democratic societies like the U.S. use subtle, non-violent means of control, unlike totalitarian systems, where physical force can readily be used to coerce the general population. In an often-quoted remark, Chomsky states that "propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state." (Media Control)

The model attempts to explain this perceived systemic bias of the mass media in terms of structural economic causes rather than a conspiracy of people. It argues the bias derives from five "filters" that all published news must "pass through," which combine to systematically distort news coverage.

In explaining the first filter, ownership, he notes that most major media outlets are owned by large corporations. The second, funding, notes that the outlets derive the majority of their funding from advertising, not readers. Thus, since they are profit-oriented businesses selling a product—readers and audiences—to other businesses (advertisers), the model expects them to publish news that reflects the desires and values of those businesses. In addition, the news media are dependent on government institutions and major businesses with strong biases as sources (the third filter) for much of their information. Flak, the fourth filter, refers to the various pressure groups that attack the media for supposed bias. Norms, the fifth filter, refer to the common conceptions shared by those in the profession of journalism. (Note: in the original text, published in 1988, the fifth filter was "anticommunism". However, with the fall of the Soviet Union, it has been broadened to allow for shifts in public opinion.) The model describes how the media form a decentralized and non-conspiratorial but nonetheless very powerful propaganda system, that is able to mobilize an elite consensus, frame public debate within elite perspectives and at the same time give the appearance of democratic consent.

Chomsky and Herman test their model empirically by picking "paired examples"—pairs of events that were objectively similar except for the alignment of domestic elite interests. They use a number of such examples to attempt to show that in cases where an "official enemy" does something (like murder of a religious official), the press investigates thoroughly and devotes a great amount of coverage to the matter, thus victims of "enemy" states are considered "worthy". But when the domestic government or an ally does the same thing (or worse), the press downplays the story, thus victims of US or US client states are considered "unworthy."

They also test their model against the case that is often held up as the best example of a free and aggressively independent press, the media coverage of the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War. Even in this case, they argue that the press was behaving subserviently to elite interests.

Academic achievements, awards and honors

In early 1969, he delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford University; in January 1970, the Bertrand Russell Memorial Lecture at University of Cambridge; in 1972, the Nehru Memorial Lecture in New Delhi; in 1977, the Huizinga Lecture in Leiden; in 1988 the Massey Lectures at the University of Toronto, titled "Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies"; in 1997, The Davie Memorial Lecture on Academic Freedom in Cape Town, and many others.

Chomsky has received many honorary degrees from universities around the world, including from the following:

University of London

University of Chicago

Loyola University of Chicago

Swarthmore College

University of Delhi

Bard College

University of Massachusetts

University of Pennsylvania

Georgetown University

Amherst College

University of Cambridge

University of Colorado

University of Buenos Aires

McGill University

Rovira i Virgili University

Columbia University

Villanova University

University of Connecticut

University of Maine

Scuola Normale Superiore

University of Western Ontario

University of Toronto

Harvard University

Universidad de Chile

University of Bologna

Universidad de La Frontera

University of Calcutta

Universidad Nacional de Colombia

Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Santo Domingo Institute of Technology

Uppsala University

University of Athens

University of Cyprus

Central Connecticut State University

National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM)

Peking University National Tsing Hua University He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. In addition, he is a member of other professional and learned societies in the United States and abroad, and is a recipient of the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences, the Helmholtz Medal, the Dorothy Eldridge Peacemaker Award, the 1999 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science, and others. He is twice winner of The Orwell Award, granted by The National Council of Teachers of English for "Distinguished Contributions to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language" (in 1987 and 1989).

He is a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Department of Social Sciences.

In 2005, Chomsky received an honorary fellowship from the Literary and Historical Society. In 2007, Chomsky received The Uppsala University (Sweden) Honorary Doctor's degree in commemoration of Carolus Linnaeus. In February 2008, he received the President's Medal from the Literary and Debating Society of the National University of Ireland, Galway. Since 2009 he is an honorary member of IAPTI.

In 2010, Chomsky received the Erich Fromm Prize in Stuttgart, Germany. In April 2010, Chomsky became the third scholar to receive the University of Wisconsin's A.E. Havens Center's Award for Lifetime Contribution to Critical Scholarship.

Chomsky has an Erdős number of four.

Chomsky was voted the leading living public intellectual in The 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll conducted by the British magazine ''Prospect''. He reacted, saying "I don't pay a lot of attention to polls". In a list compiled by the magazine ''New Statesman'' in 2006, he was voted seventh in the list of "Heroes of our time".

Actor Viggo Mortensen with avant-garde guitarist Buckethead dedicated their 2006 album, called ''Pandemoniumfromamerica'', to Chomsky.

On January 22, 2010, a special honorary concert for Chomsky was given at Kresge Auditorium at MIT. The concert, attended by Chomsky and dozens of his family and friends, featured music composed by Edward Manukyan and speeches by Chomsky's colleagues, including David Pesetsky of MIT and Gennaro Chierchia, head of the linguistics department at Harvard University.

In June 2011, Chomsky was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize, which cited his "unfailing courage, critical analysis of power and promotion of human rights".

In 2011, Chomsky was inducted into IEEE Intelligent Systems' AI's Hall of Fame for the "significant contributions to the field of AI and intelligent systems".

Bibliography

Filmography

''Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media'', Director: Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick (1992)

''Last Party 2000'', Director: Rebecca Chaiklin and Donovan Leitch (2001)

''Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times'', Director: John Junkerman (2002)

''Distorted Morality—America's War On Terror?'', Director: John Junkerman (2003)

''Noam Chomsky: Rebel Without a Pause'' (TV), Director: Will Pascoe (2003)

''The Corporation'', Directors: Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott; Writer: Joel Bakan (2003)

''Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land'', Directors: Sut Jhally and Bathsheba Ratzkoff (2004)

''On Power, Dissent and Racism: A discussion with Noam Chomsky'', Journalist: Nicolas Rossier; Producers: Eli Choukri, Baraka Productions (2004)

''Lake of Fire'', Director: Tony Kaye (2006)

''American Feud: A History of Conservatives and Liberals'', Director: Richard Hall (2008)

''Chomsky & Cie'' Director: Olivier Azam (out in 2008)

''An Inconvenient Tax'', Director: Christopher P. Marshall (out in 2009)

''The Money Fix,'' Director: Alan Rosenblith (2009)

''Pax Americana and the Weaponization of Space'', Director: Denis Delestrac (2010)

''Article 12: Waking up in a surveillance society'', Director: Juan Manuel Biaiñ (2010)

See also

American philosophy

Axiom of categoricity

Chomskybot

"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously"

English studies

Knowledge worker

List of American philosophers

Important publications in computability

''The Anti-Chomsky Reader''

References

External links

chomsky.info official website

Noam Chomsky at MIT

Noam Chomsky articles on libcom.org

Noam Chomsky at ''Democracy Now!''

Column archive at ''The Guardian''

Articles and videos featuring Noam Chomsky at AnarchismToday.org

;Interviews and articles

Talks by Noam Chomsky at A-Infos Radio Project

Interview about Human Rights by scholars (English with French subtitles) – 2009

Chomsky media files at the Internet Archive

Noam Chomsky interviewed by Alyssa McDonald on ''New Statesman'', September 2010.

The Real News (TRNN) ">Noam Chomsky Interviews on The Real News (TRNN)

Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance – discussion on the "Bush doctrine" and its implications, C-SPAN, Feb 2004

Philosophies of Language & Politics – talk at The Commonwealth Club, October 2009

Thought Economics Interviews Noam Chomsky – Noam Chomsky interviewed on global democracy, April 2011

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Coordinates	52°2′″N23°7′″N
name	Italo Calvino
birth name	Italo Giovanni Calvino-Mameli
birth date	October 15, 1923
birth place	Santiago de Las Vegas, Cuba
death date	September 19, 1985
death place	Siena, Italy
occupation	Journalist, short story writer, novelist, essayist
nationality	Italian
movement	Neorealism, Postmodernism
notableworks	''The Baron in the Trees'' ''Invisible Cities'' ''If on a winter's night a traveler''''Six Memos for the Next Millennium''
influences	Ludovico Ariosto, Samuel Beckett, Ambrose Bierce, Jorge Luis Borges, Galileo Galilei, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka, Vladimir Nabokov, Cesare Pavese, Georges Perec, Edgar Allan Poe, Raymond Queneau, Robert Louis Stevenson, Voltaire
influenced	Aimee Bender, Umberto Eco, Amanda Filipacchi, Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushdie, W. G. Sebald }}

Italo Giovanni Calvino-Mameli (15 October 1923 – 19 September 1985) () was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the ''Our Ancestors'' trilogy (1952–1959), the ''Cosmicomics'' collection of short stories (1965), and the novels ''Invisible Cities'' (1972) and ''If on a winter's night a traveler'' (1979).

Lionised in Britain and the United States, he was the most-translated contemporary Italian writer at the time of his death, and a noted contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Biography

Cuba

Italo Calvino was born in Santiago de Las Vegas, a suburb of Havana, Cuba in 1923. His father, Mario, was a tropical agronomist and botanist who also taught agriculture and floriculture. Born 47 years earlier in San Remo, Italy, Mario Calvino had emigrated to Mexico in 1909 where he took up an important position with the Ministry of Agriculture. In an autobiographical essay, Italo Calvino explained that his father "had been in his youth an anarchist, a follower of Kropotkin and then a Socialist Reformist". In 1917, Mario left for Cuba to conduct scientific experiments, after living through the Mexican Revolution.

Calvino's mother, Eva Mameli, was a botanist and university professor. A native of Sassari in Sardinia and 11 years younger than her husband, she married while still a junior lecturer at Pavia University. Born into a secular family, Eva was a pacifist educated in the "religion of civic duty and science". Calvino described his parents as being "very different in personality from one another", suggesting perhaps deeper tensions behind a comfortable, albeit strict, middle-class upbringing devoid of conflict. As an adolescent, he found it hard relating to poverty and the working-class, and was "ill at ease" with his parents’ openness to the laborers who filed into his father's study on Saturdays to receive their weekly paycheck.

Early life and education

In 1925, less than two years after Calvino's birth, the family returned to Italy and settled definitively in San Remo on the Ligurian coast. Calvino's brother Floriano, who became a distinguished geologist, was born in 1927.

The family divided their time between the Villa Meridiana, an experimental floriculture station which also served as their home, and Mario's ancestral land at San Giovanni Battista. On this small working farm set in the hills behind San Remo, Mario pioneered in the cultivation of then exotic fruits such as avocado and grapefruit, eventually obtaining an entry in the ''Dizionario biografico degli italiani'' for his achievements. The vast forests and luxuriant fauna omnipresent in Calvino's early fiction such as ''The Baron in the Trees'' derives from this "legacy". In an interview, Calvino stated that "San Remo continues to pop out in my books, in the most diverse pieces of writing." He and Floriano would climb the tree-rich estate and perch for hours on the branches reading their favorite adventure stories. Less salubrious aspects of this "paternal legacy" are described in ''The Road to San Giovanni'', Calvino's memoir of his father in which he exposes their inability to communicate: "Talking to each other was difficult. Both verbose by nature, possessed of an ocean of words, in each other's presence we became mute, would walk in silence side by side along the road to San Giovanni." A fan of Rudyard Kipling's ''The Jungle Book'' as a child, Calvino felt that his early interest in stories made him the "black sheep" of a family that held literature in less esteem than the sciences. Fascinated by American movies and cartoons, he was equally attracted to drawing, poetry, and theatre. On a darker note, Calvino recalled that his earliest memory was of a socialist professor brutalized by Fascist lynch-squads. "I remember clearly that we were at dinner when the old professor came in with his face beaten up and bleeding, his bowtie all torn, asking for help."

Other legacies include the parents’ masonic republicanism which occasionally developed into anarchic socialism. Austere, anti-Fascist freethinkers, Eva and Mario refused to give their sons any religious education. Italo attended the English nursery school St George's College, followed by a Protestant elementary private school run by Waldensians. His secondary schooling was completed at the state-run Liceo Gian Domenico Cassini where, at his parents’ request, he was exempted from religious instruction but forced to justify his anticonformist stance. In his mature years, Calvino described the experience as a salutary one as it made him "tolerant of others’ opinions, particularly in the field of religion, remembering how irksome it was to hear myself mocked because I did not follow the majority's beliefs”. During this time, he met a brilliant student from Rome, Eugenio Scalfari, who went on to found the weekly magazine ''L'Espresso'' and ''La Repubblica'', a major Italian newspaper. The two teenagers formed a lasting friendship, Calvino attributing his political awakening to their university discussions. Seated together "on a huge flat stone in the middle of a stream near our land", he and Scalfari founded the MUL (University Liberal Movement).

Eva managed to delay her son's enrolment in the Fascist armed scouts, the ''Balilla Moschettieri'', and then arranged that he be excused, as a non-Catholic, from performing devotional acts in church. But later on, as a compulsory member, he could not avoid the assemblies and parades of the ''Avanguardisti'', and was forced to participate in the Italian occupation of the French Riviera in June 1940.

World War II

In 1941, Calvino dutifully enrolled at the University of Turin, choosing the Agriculture Faculty where his father had previously taught courses in agronomy. Concealing his literary ambitions to please his family, he passed four exams in his first year while reading anti-Fascist works by Elio Vittorini, Eugenio Montale, Cesare Pavese, Johan Huizinga, and Pisacane, and works by Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, and Albert Einstein on physics. Disdainful of Turin students, Calvino saw himself as enclosed in a "provincial shell" that offered the illusion of immunity from the Fascist nightmare: "We were ‘hard guys’ from the provinces, hunters, snooker-players, show-offs, proud of our lack of intellectual sophistication, contemptuous of any patriotic or military rhetoric, coarse in our speech, regulars in the brothels, dismissive of any romantic sentiment and desperately devoid of women."

Calvino transferred to the University of Florence in 1943 and reluctantly passed three more exams in agriculture. By the end of the year, the Germans had succeeded in occupying Liguria and setting up Benito Mussolini's puppet Republic of Salò in northern Italy. Now twenty years old, Calvino refused military service and went into hiding. Reading intensely in a wide array of subjects, he also reasoned politically that, of all the partisan groupings, the communists were the best organized with "the most convincing political line".

In spring 1944, Eva encouraged her sons to enter the Italian Resistance in the name of "natural justice and family virtues". Using the battlename of "Santiago", Calvino joined the ''Garibaldi Brigades'', a clandestine Communist group and, for twenty months, endured the fighting in the Maritime Alps until 1945 and the Liberation. As a result of his refusal to be a conscript, his parents were held hostage by the Nazis for an extended period at the Villa Meridiana. Calvino wrote of his mother's ordeal that "she was an example of tenacity and courage… behaving with dignity and firmness before the SS and the Fascist militia, and in her long detention as a hostage, not least when the blackshirts three times pretended to shoot my father in front of her eyes. The historical events which mothers take part in acquire the greatness and invincibility of natural phenomena".

Turin and communism

Calvino settled in Turin in 1945, after a long hesitation over living there or in Milan. He often humorously belittled this choice, describing Turin as a "city that is serious but sad". Returning to university, he abandoned Agriculture for the Arts Faculty. A year later, he was initiated into the literary world by Elio Vittorini, who published his short story "Andato al comando" (1945; "Gone to Headquarters") in ''Il Politecnico'', a Turin-based weekly magazine associated with the university. The horror of the war had not only provided the raw material for his literary ambitions but deepened his commitment to the Communist cause. Viewing civilian life as a continuation of the partisan struggle, he confirmed his membership of the Italian Communist Party. On reading Vladimir Lenin's ''State and Revolution'', he plunged into post-war political life, associating himself chiefly with the worker's movement in Turin.

In 1947, he graduated with a Master's thesis on Joseph Conrad, wrote short stories in his spare time, and landed a job in the publicity department at the Einaudi publishing house run by Giulio Einaudi. Although brief, his stint put him in regular contact with Cesare Pavese, Natalia Ginzburg, Norberto Bobbio, and many other left-wing intellectuals and writers. He then left Einaudi to work as a journalist for the official Communist daily, ''L'Unità'', and the newborn Communist political magazine, ''Rinascita''. During this period, Pavese and poet Alfonso Gatto were Calvino's closest friends and mentors.

His first novel, ''Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno'' (''The Path to the Nest of Spiders'') written with valuable editorial advice from Pavese, won the Premio Riccione on publication in 1947. With sales topping 5000 copies, a surprise success in postwar Italy, the novel inaugurated Calvino's neorealist period. In a clairvoyant essay, Pavese praised the young writer as a "squirrel of the pen" who "climbed into the trees, more for fun than fear, to observe partisan life as a fable of the forest". In 1948, he interviewed one of his literary idols, Ernest Hemingway, travelling with Natalia Ginzburg to his home in Stresa.

''Ultimo viene il corvo'' (''The Crow Comes Last''), a collection of stories based on his wartime experiences, was published to acclaim in 1949. Despite the triumph, Calvino grew increasingly worried by his inability to compose a worthy second novel. He returned to Einaudi in 1950, responsible this time for the literary volumes. He eventually became a consulting editor, a position that allowed him to hone his writing talent, discover new writers, and develop into "a reader of texts". In late 1951, presumably to advance in the Communist Party, he spent two months in the Soviet Union as correspondent for ''l'Unità''. While in Moscow, he learned of his father's death on 25 October. The articles and correspondence he produced from this visit were published in 1952, winning the Saint-Vincent Prize for journalism.

Over a seven-year period, Calvino wrote three realist novels, ''The White Schooner'' (1947–1949), ''Youth in Turin'' (1950–1951), and ''The Queen's Necklace'' (1952–54), but all were deemed defective. During the eighteen months it took to complete ''I giovani del Po'' (''Youth in Turin''), he made an important self-discovery: "I began doing what came most naturally to me – that is, following the memory of the things I had loved best since boyhood. Instead of making myself write the book I ''ought'' to write, the novel that was expected of me, I conjured up the book I myself would have liked to read, the sort by an unknown writer, from another age and another country, discovered in an attic." The result was ''Il visconte dimezzato'' (1952; ''The Cloven Viscount'') composed in 30 days between July and September 1951. The protagonist, a seventeenth century viscount sundered in two by a cannonball, incarnated Calvino's growing political doubts and the divisive turbulence of the Cold War. Skillfully interweaving elements of the fable and the fantasy genres, the allegorical novel launched him as a modern "fabulist". In 1954, Giulio Einaudi commissioned his ''Fiabe Italiane'' (1956; ''Italian Folktales'') on the basis of the question, "Is there an Italian equivalent of the Brothers Grimm?" For two years, Calvino collated tales found in 19th century collections across Italy then translated 200 of the finest from various dialects into Italian. Key works he read at this time were Vladimir Propp's ''Morphology of the Folktale'' and ''Historical Roots of Russian Fairy Tales'', stimulating his own ideas on the origin, shape and function of the story.

In 1952 Calvino wrote with Giorgio Bassani for ''Botteghe Oscure'', a magazine named after the popular name of the party's head-offices. He also worked for ''Il Contemporaneo'', a Marxist weekly.

From 1955 to 1958 Calvino had an affair with Italian actress Elsa De Giorgi, a married, older woman. Excerpts of the hundreds of love letters Calvino wrote to her were published in the ''Corriere della Sera'' in 2004, causing some controversy.

After communism

In 1957, disillusioned by the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, Calvino left the Italian Communist Party. In his letter of resignation published in ''L'Unità'' on 7 August, he explained the reason of his dissent (the violent suppression of the Hungarian uprising and the revelation of Joseph Stalin's crimes) while confirming his "confidence in the democratic perspectives" of world Communism. He withdrew from taking an active role in politics and never joined another party. Ostracized by the ICP party leader Palmiro Togliatti and his supporters on publication of ''Becalmed in the Antilles'' (''La gran bonaccia delle Antille''), a satirical allegory of the party’s immobilism, Calvino began writing ''The Baron in the Trees''. Completed in three months and published in 1957, the fantasy is based on the "problem of the intellectual’s political commitment at a time of shattered illusions". He found new outlets for his periodic writings in the journals ''Città aperta'' and ''Tempo presente'', the magazine ''Passato e presente'', and the weekly ''Italia Domani''. With Vittorini in 1959, he became co-editor of ''Il Menabò'', a cultural journal devoted to literature in the modern industrial age, a position he held until 1966.

Despite severe restrictions in the US against foreigners holding communist views, Calvino was allowed to visit the United States, where he stayed six months from 1959 to 1960 (four of which he spent in New York), after an invitation by the Ford Foundation. Calvino was particularly impressed by the "New World": "Naturally I visited the South and also California, but I always felt a New Yorker. My city is New York." The letters he wrote to Einaudi describing this visit to the United States were first published as "American Diary 1959–1960" in ''Hermit in Paris'' in 2003.

In 1962 Calvino met Argentinian translator Esther Judith Singer ("Chichita") and married her in 1964 in Havana, during a trip in which he visited his birthplace and was introduced to Ernesto "Che" Guevara. On 15 October 1967, a few days after Guevara's death, Calvino wrote a tribute to him that was published in Cuba in 1968, and in Italy thirty years later. He and his wife settled in Rome in the via Monte Brianzo where their daughter, Giovanna, was born in 1965. Once again working for Einaudi, Calvino began publishing some of his "Cosmicomics" in ''Il Caffè'', a literary magazine.

Later life and work

Vittorini's death in 1966 greatly affected Calvino. He went through what he called an "intellectual depression", which the writer himself described as an important passage in his life: "...I ceased to be young. Perhaps it's a metabolic process, something that comes with age, I'd been young for a long time, perhaps too long, suddenly I felt that I had to begin my old age, yes, old age, perhaps with the hope of prolonging it by beginning it early."

In the fermenting atmosphere that evolved into 1968's cultural revolution (the French May), he moved with his family to Paris in 1967, setting up home in a villa in the Square de Châtillon. Nicknamed ''L'ironique amusé'', he was invited by Raymond Queneau in 1968 to join the Oulipo (''Ouvroir de littérature potentielle'') group of experimental writers where he met Roland Barthes, Georges Perec, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, all of whom influenced his later production. That same year, he turned down the Viareggio Prize for ''Ti con zero'' (''Time and the Hunter'') on the grounds that it was an award given by "institutions emptied of meaning". He accepted, however, both the Asti Prize and the Feltrinelli Prize for his writing in 1970 and 1972, respectively. In two autobiographical essays published in 1962 and 1970, Calvino described himself as "atheist" and his outlook as "non-religious".

Calvino had more intense contacts with the academic world, with notable experiences at the Sorbonne (with Barthes) and the University of Urbino. His interests included classical studies: Honoré de Balzac, Ludovico Ariosto, Dante, Ignacio de Loyola, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Cyrano de Bergerac, and Giacomo Leopardi. Between 1972–1973 Calvino published two short stories, "The Name, the Nose" and the Oulipo-inspired "The Burning of the Abominable House" in the Italian edition of Playboy. He became a regular contributor to the important Italian newspaper ''Corriere della Sera'', spending his summer vacations in a house constructed in Roccamare near Castiglione della Pescaia, Tuscany.

In 1975 Calvino was made Honorary Member of the American Academy. Awarded the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1976, he visited Mexico, Japan, and the United States where he gave a series of lectures in several American towns. After his mother died in 1978 at the age of 92, Calvino sold Villa Meridiana, the family home in San Remo. Two years later, he moved to Rome in Piazza Campo Marzio near the Pantheon and began editing the work of Tommaso Landolfi for Rizzoli. Awarded the French Légion d'honneur in 1981, he also accepted to be jury president of the 29th Venice Film Festival.

During the summer of 1985, Calvino prepared a series of lectures to be delivered at Harvard University in the fall. On 6 September, he was admitted to the ancient hospital of Santa Maria della Scala in Siena, where he died during the night between 18 and 19 September of a cerebral hemorrhage. His lecture notes were published posthumously in Italian in 1988 and in English as ''Six Memos for the Next Millennium'' in 1993.

Authors he helped publish

Mario Rigoni Stern

Gianni Celati

Andrea De Carlo

Daniele Del Giudice

Leonardo Sciascia

Selected bibliography

A selected bibliography of Calvino's writings, listing the works that have been translated into and published in English, and a few major untranslated works. More exhaustive bibliographies can be found in Martin McLaughlin's ''Italo Calvino'', and Beno Weiss's ''Understanding Italo Calvino''.

Fiction

! Title !! Originalpublication !! Englishtranslation !! Translator

{{Book list

title = ''Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno''

publish_date = 1947

alt_title = ''The Path to the Nest of Spiders'' ''The Path to the Spiders' Nests''

aux1 = 19571998

aux2 = Archibald Colquhoun Martin McLaughlin

line_color = novel

}}

{{Book list

title = ''Il visconte dimezzato''

publish_date = 1952

alt_title = ''The Cloven Viscount''

aux1 = 1962

aux2 = Archibald Colquhoun

line_color = novel

}}

{{Book list

title = ''La formica argentina''

publish_date = 1952

alt_title = ''The Argentine Ant''

aux1 = ?

aux2 = Archibald Colquhoun

line_color = shortstory

}}

{{Book list

title = ''Fiabe Italiane''

publish_date = 1956

alt_title = ''Italian Fables'' ''Italian Folk Tales'' ''Italian Folktales''

aux1 = 1961 1975 1980

aux2 = Louis Brigante Sylvia Mulcahy George Martin

line_color = novel

}}

{{Book list

title = ''Il barone rampante''

publish_date = 1957

alt_title = ''The Baron in the Trees''

aux1 = 1959

aux2 = Archibald Colquhoun

line_color = novel

}}

{{Book list

title = ''La speculazione edilizia''

publish_date = 1957

alt_title = ''A Plunge into Real Estate''

aux1 = 1984

aux2 = D. S. Carne-Ross

line_color = shortstory

}}

{{Book list

title = ''Il cavaliere inesistente''

publish_date = 1959

alt_title = ''The Nonexistent Knight''

aux1 = 1962

aux2 = Archibald Colquhoun

line_color = novel

}}

{{Book list

title = ''La giornata d'uno scrutatore''

publish_date = 1963

alt_title = ''The Watcher''

aux1 = 1971

aux2 = William Weaver

line_color = shortstory

}}

{{Book list

title = ''Marcovaldo ovvero le stagioni in città''

publish_date = 1963

aux1 = 1983

aux2 = William Weaver

line_color = novel

}}

{{Book list

title = ''La nuvola di smog''

publish_date = 1965

alt_title = ''Smog''

aux1 = 1971

aux2 = William Weaver

line_color = shortstory

}}

{{Book list

title = ''Le cosmicomiche''

publish_date = 1965

alt_title = ''Cosmicomics''

aux1 = 1968

aux2 = William Weaver

line_color = novel

}}

{{Book list

title = ''Ti con zero''

publish_date = 1967

alt_title = ''t zero'' (also published as ''Time and the Hunter'')

aux1 = 1969

aux2 = William Weaver

line_color = novel

}}

{{Book list

title = ''Il castello dei destini incrociati''

publish_date = 1969

alt_title = ''The Castle of Crossed Destinies''

aux1 = 1977

aux2 = William Weaver

line_color = novel

}}

{{Book list

title = ''Gli amori difficili''

publish_date = 1970

alt_title = ''Difficult Loves'' (also the title of 2 different collections)

aux1 = 1984

aux2 = William Weaver

line_color = novel

}}

{{Book list

title = ''Le città invisibili''

publish_date = 1972

alt_title = ''Invisible Cities''

aux1 = 1974

aux2 = William Weaver

line_color = novel

}}

{{Book list

title = ''Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore''

publish_date = 1979

alt_title = ''If on a winter's night a traveler''

aux1 = 1981

aux2 = William Weaver

line_color = novel

}}

{{Book list

title = ''Palomar''

publish_date = 1983

alt_title = ''Mr. Palomar''

aux1 = 1985

aux2 = William Weaver

line_color = novel

}}

Fiction collections

! Title !! Originalpublication !! Englishtranslation !! Translator

{{Book list

title = ''Ultimo viene il corvo''

publish_date = 1949

alt_title = ''The Crow Comes Last''

aux1 = –

aux2 = –

short_summary = 30 short stories: ? (some of these stories appear in ''Adam, One Afternoon'', and other collections).

}}

{{Book list

title = –

publish_date = –

alt_title = ''Adam, One Afternoon and Other Stories''

aux1 = 1957

aux2 = Archibald Colquhoun, Peggy Wright

short_summary = 21 short stories: Adam, One Afternoon; The Enchanted Garden; Father to Son; A Goatherd at Luncheon; Leaving Again Shortly; The House of the Beehives; Fear on the Footpath; Hunger at Bévera; Going to Headquarters; The Crow Comes Last; One of the Three is Still Alive; Animal Wood; Theft in a Cake Shop; Dollars and the Demi-Mondaine; Sleeping Like Dogs; Desire in November; A Judgment; The Cat and the Policeman; Who Put the Mine in the Sea?; The Argentine Ant.

}}

{{Book list

title = ''I nostri antenati''

publish_date = 1960

alt_title = ''Our Ancestors''

aux1 = 1962

aux2 = Archibald Colquhoun

short_summary = 3 novels: ''The Cloven Viscount''; ''The Baron in the Trees''; ''The Nonexistent Knight''.

}}

{{Book list

title = –

publish_date = –

alt_title = ''The Watcher and Other Stories''

aux1 = 1971

aux2 = Archibald Colquhoun, William Weaver

short_summary = 3 short stories: The Watcher; The Argentine Ant; Smog.

}}

{{Book list

title = –

publish_date = –

alt_title = ''Difficult Loves''

aux1 = 1983

aux2 = William Weaver, D. S. Carne-Ross

short_summary = 3 novellas: ''Difficult Loves''; ''Smog''; ''A Plunge into Real Estate''.

}}

{{Book list

title = –

publish_date = –

alt_title = ''Difficult Loves''

aux1 = 1984

aux2 = William Weaver, Archibald Colquhoun, Peggy Wright

short_summary = The novella, ''Difficult Loves'', and 20 short stories: Adam, One Afternoon; The Enchanted Garden; A Goatherd at Luncheon; The House of the Beehives; Big Fish, Little Fish; A Ship Loaded with Crabs; Man in the Wasteland; Lazy Sons; Fear on the Footpath; Hunger at Bévera; Going to Headquarters; The Crow Comes Last; One of the Three Is Still Alive; Animal Woods; Mine Field; Theft in a Pastry Shop; Dollars and the Demimondaine; Sleeping like Dogs; Desire in November; Transit Bed.

}}

{{Book list

title = ''Sotto il sole giaguaro''

publish_date = 1986

alt_title = ''Under the Jaguar Sun''

aux1 = 1988

aux2 = William Weaver

short_summary = 3 short stories: Under the Jaguar Sun; A King Listens; The Name, The Nose.

}}

{{Book list

title = ''Prima che tu dica 'Pronto'''

publish_date = 1993

alt_title = ''Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories''

aux1 = 1996

aux2 = Tim Parks

short_summary = 37 short stories: The Man Who Shouted Teresa; The Flash; Making Do; Dry River; Conscience; Solidarity; The Black Sheep; Good for Nothing; Like a Flight of Ducks; Love Far from Home; Wind in a City; The Lost Regiment; Enemy Eyes; A General in the Library; The Workshop Hen; Numbers in the Dark; The Queen's Necklace; Becalmed in the Antilles; The Tribe with Its Eyes on the Sky; Nocturnal Soliloquy of a Scottish Nobleman; A Beautiful March Day; World Memory; Beheading the Heads; The Burning of the Abominable House; The Petrol Pump; Neanderthal Man; Montezuma; Before You Say 'Hello'; Glaciation; The Call of the Water; The Mirror, the Target; The Other Eurydice; The Memoirs of Casanova; Henry Ford; The Last Channel; Implosion; Nothing and Not Much.

}}

{{Book list

title = –

publish_date = –

alt_title = ''The Complete Cosmicomics''

aux1 = 2009

aux2 = Martin McLaughlin, Tim Parks, William Weaver

short_summary = The novel ''Cosmicomics'', the novel ''t zero'', 4 stories from ''Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories'', and 7 stories newly translated by Martin McLaughlin.

}}

Essays and other writings

! Title !! Originalpublication !! Englishtranslation !! Translator

{{Book list

publish_date = 1970

alt_title = –

aux1 = –

aux2 = –

short_summary = An interpretation of the epic poem, and selections.

line_color = nonfiction

}}

{{Book list

title = ''Autobiografia di uno spettatore''

publish_date = 1974

alt_title = ''Autobiography of a Spectator''

aux1 = –

aux2 = –

line_color = nonfiction

short_summary = Preface to Fellini's ''Quattro film''.

}}

{{Book list

title = Introduction to ''Faits divers de la terre et du ciel'' by Silvina Ocampo

publish_date = 1974

alt_title = –

aux1 = –

aux2 = –

line_color = nonfiction

short_summary = With a preface by Jorge Luis Borges.

}}

{{Book list

title = Una pietra sopra: Discorsi di letteratura e società

publish_date = 1980

alt_title = ''The Uses of Literature'' (also published as ''The Literature Machine'')

aux1 = 1986

aux2 = Patrick Creagh

line_color = nonfiction

short_summary = Essays on literature.

}}

{{Book list

title = ''Racconti fantastici dell'ottocento''

publish_date = 1983

alt_title = ''Fantastic Tales''

aux1 = 1997

aux2 = ?

short_summary = Anthology of classic supernatural stories.

}}

{{Book list

title = ''Science et métaphore chez Galilée''

publish_date = 1983

alt_title = ''Science and Metaphor in Galileo Galilei''

aux1 = –

aux2 = –

line_color = nonfiction

short_summary = Lectures given at the École des hautes études in Paris.

}}

{{Book list

title = ''The Written and the Unwritten Word''

publish_date = 1983

alt_title =

aux1 = 1983

aux2 = William Weaver

line_color = nonfiction

short_summary = Lecture at the New York Institute for the Humanities on 30 March 1983

}}

{{Book list

title = ''Collezione di sabbia''

publish_date = 1984

alt_title = ''Collection of Sand''

aux1 = –

aux2 = –

line_color = nonfiction

short_summary = Journalistic essays from 1974–1984

}}

{{Book list

title = ''Lezioni americane: Sei proposte per il prossimo millennio''

publish_date = 1988

alt_title = ''Six Memos for the Next Millennium''

aux1 = 1993

aux2 = Patrick Creagh

line_color = nonfiction

short_summary = Originally prepared for the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures. On the values of literature.

}}

{{Book list

title = ''Sulla fiaba''

publish_date = 1988

alt_title = –

aux1 = –

aux2 = –

line_color = nonfiction

short_summary = Essays on fables.

}}

{{Book list

title = ''I libri degli altri. Lettere 1947–1981''

publish_date = 1991

alt_title = –

aux1 = –

aux2 = –

line_color = nonfiction

short_summary = Letters that Calvino wrote to other authors, whilst he worked at Einaudi.

}}

{{Book list

title = ''Perché leggere i classici''

publish_date = 1991

alt_title = ''Why Read the Classics?''

aux1 = 1993

aux2 = Martin McLaughlin

line_color = nonfiction

short_summary = Essays on classic literature.

}}

Autobiographical works

! Title !! Originalpublication !! Englishtranslation !! Translator

{{Book list

title = ''L'entrata in guerra''

publish_date = 1954

alt_title = –

aux1 = –

aux2 = –

line_color = nonfiction

}}

{{Book list

title = ''La strada di San Giovanni''

publish_date = 1990

alt_title = ''The Road to San Giovanni''

aux1 = 1993

aux2 = Tim Parks

line_color = nonfiction

}}

{{Book list

title = ''Eremita a Parigi. Pagine autobiografiche''

publish_date = 1994

alt_title = ''Hermit in Paris''

aux1 = 2003

aux2 = Martin McLaughlin

line_color = nonfiction

}}

{{Book list

title = ''Album Calvino''

publish_date = 1995

alt_title = –

aux1 = –

aux2 = –

line_color = nonfiction

}}

Libretti

! Title !! Originalperformance

{{Book list

title = ''La panchina. Opera in un atto''

publish_date = 1956

alt_title = ''The Bench: One-Act Opera''

short_summary = Libretto for the opera by Sergio Liberovici.

}}

{{Book list

title = ''La vera storia''

publish_date = 1982

short_summary = Libretto for the opera by Luciano Berio.

}}

{{Book list

title = ''Un re in ascolto''

publish_date = 1984

alt_title = ''A King Listens''

short_summary = Libretto for the opera by Luciano Berio, based on Calvino's 1977 short story "A King Listens".

}}

Translations

! Original TitleTranslated title !! Original Author !! Originalpublication !! Translatedpublication

{{Book list

author=Raymond Queneau

publish_date = 1965

alt_title = ''I fiori blu''

aux1 = 1967

line_color = novel

}}

{{Book list

title = ''Le chant du Styrène''

author=Raymond Queneau

publish_date = 1958

alt_title = ''La canzone del polistirene''

aux1 = 1985

line_color = screenplay

}}

Selected filmography

Boccaccio '70, 1962 (co-wrote screenplay of ''Renzo e Luciano'' segment directed by Mario Monicelli)

''L'Amore difficile'', 1963 (wrote ''L'avventura di un soldato'' segment directed by Nino Manfredi)

''Tiko and the Shark'', 1964 (co-wrote screenplay directed by Folco Quilici)

Film and television adaptations

''The Nonexistent Knight'' by Pino Zac, 1969 (Italian animated film based on the novel)

''Amores dificiles'' by Ana Luisa Ligouri, 1983 (13' Mexican short)

''L'Aventure d'une baigneuse'' by Philippe Donzelot, 1991 (14' French short based on ''The Adventure of a Bather'' in ''Difficult Loves'' )

''Fantaghirò'' by Lamberto Bava, 1991 (TV adaptation based on ''Fanta-Ghirò the Beautiful'' in ''Italian Folktales'')

''Solidarity'' by Nancy Kiang, 2006 (10' American short)

''Conscience'' by Yu-Hsiu Camille Chen, 2009 (10' Australian short)

Films on Calvino

Damian Pettigrew, ''Inside Italo'' (''Lo specchio di Calvino''). Co-produced by ARTE France, Italy's Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, and the National Film Board of Canada, the recently completed feature-length docufiction stars Neri Marcorè as the Italian writer. Slated for a 2012 international release, the film also uses in-depth conversations videotaped at Calvino's Rome penthouse a year before his death in 1985 and rare footage from RAI, INA (Institut national de l'audiovisuel), and BBC television archives.

Awards

1946 – L'Unità Prize (shared with Marcello Venturi) for the short story, ''Minefield'' (''Campo di mine'')

1947 – Riccione Prize for ''The Path to the Nest of Spiders''

1952 – Saint-Vincent Prize

1957 – Viareggio Prize for ''The Baron in the Trees''

1959 – Bagutta Prize

1960 – Salento Prize for ''Our Ancestors''

1963 – International Charles Veillon Prize for ''The Watcher''

1970 – Asti Prize

1972 – Feltrinelli Prize for ''Invisible Cities''

1976 – Austrian State Prize for European Literature

1981 – Legion of Honour

1982 – World Fantasy Award - Life Achievement

References

Notes

Print

;Primary sources

Calvino, Italo. ''Adam, One Afternoon'' (trans. Archibald Colquhoun, Peggy Wright). London: Minerva, 1992.

—. ''The Castle of Crossed Destinies'' (trans. William Weaver). London: Secker & Warburg, 1977

—. ''Cosmicomics'' (trans. William Weaver). London: Picador, 1993.

—. ''The Crow Comes Last'' (''Ultimo viene il corvo''). Turin: Einaudi, 1949.

—. ''Difficult Loves. Smog. A Plunge into Real Estate'' (trans. William Weaver, Donald Selwyn Carne-Ross). London: Picador, 1985.

—. ''Hermit in Paris'' (trans. Martin McLaughlin). London: Jonathan Cape, 2003.

—. ''If on a winter's night a traveller'' (trans. William Weaver). London: Vintage, 1998. ISBN 0-919630-23-5

—. ''Invisible Cities'' (trans. William Weaver). London: Secker & Warburg, 1974.

—. ''Italian Fables'' (trans. Louis Brigante). New York: Collier, 1961. (50 tales)

—. ''Italian Folk Tales'' (trans. Sylvia Mulcahy). London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1975. (24 tales)

—. ''Italian Folktales'' (trans. George Martin). Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980. (complete 200 tales)

—. ''Marcovaldo or the Seasons in the City'' (trans. William Weaver). London: Minerva, 1993.

—. ''Mr. Palomar'' (trans. William Weaver). London: Vintage, 1999.

—. ''Our Ancestors'' (trans. A. Colquhoun). London: Vintage, 1998.

—. ''The Path to the Nest of Spiders'' (trans. Archibald Colquhoun). Boston: Beacon, 1957.

—. ''The Path to the Spiders' Nests'' (trans. A. Colquhoun, revised by Martin McLaughlin). London: Jonathan Cape, 1993.

—. ''t zero'' (trans. William Weaver). New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969.

—. ''The Road to San Giovanni'' (trans. Tim Parks). New York: Vintage International, 1993.

—. ''Six Memos for the Next Millennium'' (trans. Patrick Creagh). New York: Vintage International, 1993.

—. ''The Watcher and Other Stories'' (trans. William Weaver). New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1971.

;Secondary sources

Barenghi, Mario, and Bruno Falcetto. ''Romanzi e racconti di Italo Calvino''. Milano: Mondadori, 1991.

Bernardini Napoletano, Francesca. ''I segni nuovi di Italo Calvino''. Rome: Bulzoni, 1977.

Bonura, Giuseppe. ''Invito alla lettura di Calvino''. Milan: U. Mursia, 1972.

Calvino, Italo. ''Uno scrittore pomeridiano: Intervista sull'arte della narrativa'' a cura di William Weaver e Damian Pettigrew con un ricordo di Pietro Citati. Rome: minimum fax, 2003. ISBN 978-88-87765-86-1.

Corti, Maria. 'Intervista: Italo Calvino' in ''Autografo 2'' (October 1985): 47–53.

Di Carlo, Franco. ''Come leggere I nostri antenati''. Milan: U. Mursia, 1958. (1998 ISBN 978-88-425-2215-7).

McLaughlin, Martin. ''Italo Calvino''. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998. ISBN 978-0-7486-0735-8 (pb. ISBN 978-0-7486-0917-8).

Weiss, Beno. ''Understanding Italo Calvino''. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993. ISBN 978-0-87249-858-7.

Online

Italo Calvino at Emory University Online Resources and Links

Outside the Town of Malbork A Site for Italo Calvino

The Words that Failed Calvino on Che Guevara

Further reading

General

Benussi, Cristina (1989). ''Introduzione a Calvino''. Rome: Laterza.

Bartoloni, Paolo (2003). ''Interstitial Writing: Calvino, Caproni, Sereni and Svevo''. Leicester: Troubador.

Bloom, Harold (ed.)(2002). ''Bloom's Major Short Story Writers: Italo Calvino''. Broomall, Pennsylvania: Chelsea House.

Cannon, JoAnn (1981). ''Italo Calvino: Writer and Critic''. Ravenna: Longo Press.

Carter III, Albert Howard (1987). ''Italo Calvino: Metamorphoses of Fantasy.'' Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press.

Chubb, Stephen (1997). ''I, Writer, I, Reader: the Concept of the Self in the Fiction of Italo Calvino''. Leicester: Troubador.

Gabriele, Tomassina (1994). ''Italo Calvino: Eros and Language''. Teaneck, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

Jeannet, Angela M. (2000) ''Under the Radiant Sun and the Crescent Moon''. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Markey, Constance (1999). ''Italo Calvino. A Journey Toward Postmodernism''. Gainsville: Florida University Press.

—. Interview. "Italo Calvino: The Contemporary Fabulist" in ''Italian Quarterly'', 23 (spring 1982): 77–85.

Pilz, Kerstin (2005). ''Mapping Complexity: Literature and Science in the Works of Italo Calvino''. Leicester: Troubador.

Ricci, Franco (1990). ''Difficult Games: A Reading of 'I racconti' by Italo Calvino''. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

– (2001). ''Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures''. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ISBN 0-8020-3507-8

External links

Italo Calvino at Emory University On-Line Resources and Links

Outside the Town of Malbork A Site for Italo Calvino

;Excerpts, essays, artwork

If on a winter's night a traveler First chapter excerpts

How Much Shall We Bet? Chapter 8 of ''Cosmicomics''

Calvino on Myth

Calvino on Che Guevara

In Calvino veritas Essays on Calvino

Category:1923 births Category:1985 deaths Category:University of Turin alumni Category:University of Florence alumni Category:People from La Habana Province Category:University of Paris people Category:Harvard University people Category:Collectors of fairy tales Category:Italian journalists Category:Italian novelists Category:Italian resistance members Category:OuLiPo members Category:Italian short story writers Category:Légion d'honneur recipients Category:Magic realism writers Category:Postmodern writers Category:Austrian State Prize for European Literature winners Category:Viareggio Prize winners Category:Italian atheists Category:Italian communists

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