Gore Vidal
Vidal in New York City to discuss his 2009 book, Gore Vidal: Snapshots in History's Glare
Born	Eugene Luther Gore Vidal (1925-10-03) October 3, 1925 (age 86) West Point, New York, U.S.
Pen name	Edgar Box Cameron Kay Katherine Everard
Occupation	Novelist, essayist, journalist, playwright
Nationality	United States
Period	1944–present
Genres	Drama, fictional prose, essay, literary criticism
Literary movement	Postmodernism
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 ( /ˌɡɔr vɨˈdɑːl/;^[1][2] born October 3, 1925) is an American author, playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and political activist. His third novel, The City and the Pillar (1948), 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 life[link]

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).^[3][4] 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.^[5] According to "West Point and the Third Loyalty", an article Vidal wrote for The New York Review of Books (October 18, 1973),^[4] he later decided to be called Gore in honor of his maternal grandfather, Thomas Gore, Democratic senator from Oklahoma.

Photo of Vidal by Carl Van Vechten, 1948

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,^[6] was one of the first Army Air Corps pilots and, according to biographer Susan Butler, was the great love of Amelia Earhart's life.^[7] 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).^[8][9]

Gore Vidal's mother was a socialite who made her Broadway debut as an extra^[10] in Sign of the Leopard in 1928.^[11] She married Eugene Luther Vidal, Sr. in 1922 and divorced him in 1935.^[12] 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.^[13] She was an alternate delegate to the 1940 Democratic National Convention.^[14]

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.^[15] Vidal's nephews include the brothers Burr Steers, writer and film director, and painter Hugh Auchincloss Steers (1963–1995).^[16][17]

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 often 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.^[18] Gore attended St. Albans in 1939, but left to study in France. He returned following the outbreak of World War II and studied at the Los Alamos Ranch School in 1940, later transferring to Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire.^[19] After graduating in 1943 he joined the U.S. Army as a private. He was deployed to the Aleutian Islands during World War II, where he served as first mate on the F.S. 35th which was berthed at Dutch Harbor.^[10]

Personal life[link]

Vidal photo by Carl Van Vechten

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.^[20] 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.^[21]

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) in Amalfi Coast, 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[link]

Fiction[link]

Vidal, whom a Newsweek critic called "the best all-around American man of letters since Edmund Wilson,"^[22] began his writing career at nineteen, with the publication of the military novel Williwaw, based upon his Alaskan Harbor Detachment duty. The novel was the first about World War II and proved a success for Vidal.^[23] 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 March 1, 1945;^[24] Vidal later said that Trimble was the only person he had ever loved.^[25]

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.^[26] In response, Vidal wrote several mystery novels the early 1950s under the pseudonym "Edgar Box". Featuring public relations man Peter Cutler Sargeant II,^[27] their success financed Vidal for more than a decade.^[28]

Gore Vidal in 2008 at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.

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 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.^[29] Heston denied that Vidal contributed significantly to the script.^[30]

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.^[31] 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.^[32]

Essays and memoirs[link]

Vidal is—at least in the U.S.—even more respected as an essayist than as a novelist.^[33] 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 Nonfiction for the collection United States: Essays 1952–1992^[34] According to the citation, "Whatever his subject, he addresses it with an artist's resonant appreciation, a scholar's conscience, and the persuasive powers of a great essayist."^{[citation needed]} 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.^[35] In the September 1969 edition of Esquire, for example, Vidal wrote, "We are all bisexual to begin with. That is a fact of our condition. And we are all responsive to sexual stimuli from our own as well as from the opposite sex. Certain societies at certain times, usually in the interest of maintaining the baby supply, have discouraged homosexuality. Other societies, particularly militaristic ones, have exalted it. But regardless of tribal taboos, homosexuality is a constant fact of the human condition and it is not a sickness, not a sin, not a crime . . . despite the best efforts of our puritan tribe to make it all three. Homosexuality is as natural as heterosexuality. Notice I use the word 'natural,' not normal."^[36]

In 2005, Jay Parini was appointed as Vidal's literary executor.^[37]

In 2009, he won the annual Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation, which called him a "prominent social critic on politics, history, literature, and culture".^[38]

Acting and popular culture[link]

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, which was directed by his nephew Burr Steers. 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[link]

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.^[39][40]

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%.^[41] 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.^[42]

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.^[43]

From 1970 to 1972, Vidal was one of the chairmen of the People's Party.^[44] In 1971, he wrote an article in Esquire advocating consumer advocate Ralph Nader for president in the 1972 election.^[45]

In 1982 he campaigned against incumbent Governor Jerry Brown for the Democratic primary election to the United States Senate from California. 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,^[46][47] Vidal wrote in the 1970s:

There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party...and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt—until recently... and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.^[48]

Despite this, Vidal has said "I think of myself as a conservative."^[49] 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."^[50] At a 1999 lecture in Dublin, Vidal said:

A characteristic of our present chaos is the dramatic migration of tribes. They are on the move from east to west, from south to north. Liberal tradition requires that borders must always be open to those in search of safety or even the pursuit of happiness. But now with so many millions of people on the move, even the great-hearted are becoming edgy. Norway is large enough and empty enough to take in 40 to 50 million homeless Bengalis. If the Norwegians say that, all in all, they would rather not take them in, is this to be considered racism? I think not. It is simply self-preservation, the first law of species.”^[51]

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.^[52] 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."^[53]

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.^[54]

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.^[55]

Gore Vidal and former U.S. Senator George McGovern at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, August 26, 2009

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.^[56]

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".^[57]

In April 2009, Vidal accepted appointment to the position of honorary president of the American Humanist Association, succeeding Kurt Vonnegut.^[58]

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.^[59]

Vidal versus Buckley[link]

In 1968, ABC News invited Vidal and William F. Buckley, Jr. to be political analysts of the Republican and Democratic presidential conventions.^[60] 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.^[61] Buckley later expressed regret for having called Vidal a "queer," but nonetheless described Vidal as an "evangelist for bisexuality."^[62] In 2011, Vidal recalled that moderator Smith was "patently in favor of Buckley throughout the decades."^[10]

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".^[36] 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."^{[citation needed]} 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.^{[citation needed]}

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.^[63] 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.^[10]

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.^{[citation needed]}

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."^[64] 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:

I thought hell is bound to be a livelier place, as he joins forever those whom he served in life, applauding their prejudices and fanning their hatred.^[65]

Criticism of the George W. Bush administration[link]

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.^[66] He has described George W. Bush as "the stupidest man in the United States".^[67]

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.^[68]

In May 2007, Vidal clarified his views, saying:

I'm not a conspiracy theorist, I'm a conspiracy analyst. Everything the Bushites touch is screwed up. They could never have pulled off 9/11, even if they wanted to. Even if they longed to. They could step aside, though, or just go out to lunch while these terrible things were happening to the nation. I believe that of them.^[69]

Statement regarding the Roman Polanski sexual abuse case[link]

In response to the Roman Polanski sexual abuse case, Vidal said: "I really don’t give a fuck. Look, am I going to sit and weep every time a young hooker feels as though she’s been taken advantage of?"^[70] His position was criticized by journalists and columnists in The Huffington Post^[71][72] and The Atlantic,^[73] as well as by Bill Maher.^[74]

Bibliography[link]

Essays and non-fiction[link]

• 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 —National Book Award^[34]
• 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 0-8109-5049-9

Plays[link]

• 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[link]

• 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 1-125-97948-8
• 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[link]

• 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[link]

• 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

Media appearances[link]

• 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)^[75]
• Gattaca – Plays Director Josef in science-fiction film (1997)

Shadow Conspiracy - Play Congressman Paige Political Thriller (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
• Jon Wiener's radio program in Los Angeles^[76]
• 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"^[77] (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^[78] (June, 2008)
• Zero: An Investigation Into 9/11^[79] (June, 2008)
• Interview^[80] 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)^[81]
• Real Time with Bill Maher (April 10, 2009)
• Shrink (2009 film)
• "Gore Vidal's America"^[82] on The Real News Network (December 24, 2010)
• What's My Line? occasional guest panelist (early 1960s)

See also[link]

World War II portal

• Politics in fiction

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Gore Vidal

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Gore Vidal

• The Official Website of Gore Vidal
• The Gore Vidal Index, by Harry Kloman
• The Gore Vidal Pages
• Gore Vidal at the Internet Movie Database
• Gore Vidal at the Internet Broadway Database
• Gore Vidal at the Internet Off-Broadway Database
• Gore Vidal at AllRovi
• 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
• Appearances on C-SPAN
  • In Depth interview with Vidal, October 1, 2000
• Gore Vidal on Charlie Rose
• Works by or about Gore Vidal in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Gore Vidal collected news and commentary at The New York Times
• 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
• The Essays of Gore Vidal At Open Letters Monthly
• Gore Vidal Interview with Melvyn Bragg in New Statesman Magazine - 11 October 2010
• Gerald Clarke (Fall 1974). "Gore Vidal, The Art of Fiction No. 50". The Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3917/the-art-of-fiction-no-50-gore-vidal. 

Italo Calvino (15 October 1923 – 19 September 1985) (Italian pronunciation: [ˈiːtalo kalˈviːno]) 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.^[1]

Biography[link]

Cuba[link]

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.^[2] 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".^[3] 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".^[4] Calvino described his parents as being "very different in personality from one another",^[3] 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.^[5]

Early life and education[link]

In 1925, less than two years after Calvino's birth, the family returned to Italy and settled permanently 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."^[6] He and Floriano would climb the tree-rich estate and perch for hours on the branches reading their favorite adventure stories.^[7] 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."^[8] 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."^[9]

Other legacies include the parents’ masonic republicanism which occasionally developed into anarchic socialism.^[10] Austere, anti-Fascist freethinkers, Eva and Mario refused to give their sons any religious education.^[11] 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”.^[12] 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",^[9] 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.^[13] But later on, as a compulsory member, he could not avoid the assemblies and parades of the Avanguardisti,^[14] and was forced to participate in the Italian occupation of the French Riviera in June 1940.^[15]

World War II[link]

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.^[16] Disdainful of Turin students, Calvino saw himself as enclosed in a "provincial shell"^[17] 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."^[17]

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".^[18]

In spring 1944, Eva encouraged her sons to enter the Italian Resistance in the name of "natural justice and family virtues".^[19] 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".^[19]

Turin and communism[link]

Calvino settled in Turin in 1945, after a long hesitation over living there or in Milan.^[20] 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.^[21] 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.^[22]

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.^[23]

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.^[24] 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".^[25] 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".^[26] 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.^[27] 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."^[28] 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.^[29] Skillfully interweaving elements of the fable and the fantasy genres, the allegorical novel launched him as a modern "fabulist".^[30] 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?"^[31] 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.^[32]

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.^[33]

After communism[link]

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.^[34] He withdrew from taking an active role in politics and never joined another party.^[35] 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".^[36] 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.^[37]

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.^[38] 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[link]

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.^[39] 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".^[40] 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".^[41]

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[link]

• Mario Rigoni Stern
• Gianni Celati
• Andrea De Carlo
• Daniele Del Giudice
• Leonardo Sciascia

Selected bibliography[link]

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.^[42][43]

Fiction[link]

Fiction collections[link]

Essays and other writings[link]

Autobiographical works[link]

Libretti[link]

Translations[link]

Selected filmography[link]

• 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[link]

• 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[link]

• Damian Pettigrew, Inside Italo (Lo specchio di Calvino, 2012). 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 2013 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.^[46]

Awards[link]

• 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[link]

Notes[link]

Print[link]

Further reading[link]

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[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Italo Calvino

• Italo Calvino at Emory University On-Line Resources and Links
• Outside the Town of Malbork A Site for Italo Calvino
• Damian Pettigrew, William Weaver (Fall 1992). "Italo Calvino, The Art of Fiction No. 130". Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2027/the-art-of-fiction-no-130-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