| Name | Gore Vidal |
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| Caption | Vidal in New York City to discuss his 2009 book, Gore Vidal: Snapshots in History's Glare |
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| Pseudonym | Edgar BoxCameron KayKatherine Everard |
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| Birthname | Eugene Luther Gore Vidal |
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| Birthdate | October 03, 1925 |
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| Birthplace | West Point, New York, U.S. |
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| Occupation | Novelist, essayist, journalist, playwright |
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| Nationality | United States |
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| Parents | Eugene Luther Vidal |
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| Genre | Drama, fictional prose, essay, literary criticism |
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| Movement | Postmodernism |
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| Ideology | Fascism |
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| Influences | Petronius, Apuleius, Thomas Mann, Henry James, Mark Twain, Montaigne, Carson McCullers |
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| Influenced | William Kennedy, Clive James, Christopher Hitchens, Truman Capote, Bill Maher}} |
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Eugene Luther 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 subsequently emerged as one of America's most important literary figures due to the enormous quantity and quality of work produced over the course of his career, including novels, essays, plays, and short stories covering a wide variety of topics and eras. He also ran for political office twice and served as a longtime political critic.
Early years
Vidal was born 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), 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 nephew Burr Steers is a writer and film director, and nephew Hugh Auchincloss Steers (1963–1995) was a painter whose work is in the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Denver Art Museum.
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. In 1943, on graduating from Phillips Exeter Academy, Vidal joined the U.S. Army Reserve serving in the Aleutian Islands during World War II, where he served as master of an Army freight and supply boat.
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
Festival of Books.]]
Vidal, whom a
Newsweek critic has 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 chronologically the first of the
war novels about World War II. A few years later,
The City and the Pillar caused a furor for its dispassionate presentation of homosexuality.
The New York Times refused to review his next five books. The novel was dedicated to "J.T."
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. Subsequently he wrote plays, films, and television series. Two plays, The Best Man and Visit to a Small Planet, were both Broadway and film successes. In the early 1950s he also wrote under the pseudonym "Edgar Box", producing three mystery novels featuring public relations man "Peter Cutler Sargeant II".
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 Ben-Hur script, 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.
Vidal's third novel in the '60s was the satirical transsexual comedy Myra Breckinridge (1968), a variation on familiar Vidalian 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, 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 (1970), subtitled "A Novel in the Form of a Memoir", Vidal focused on essays and two distinct strains 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." This series' Narratives of Empire titles include Burr (1973), 1876 (1976), Lincoln (1984), Empire (1987), Hollywood (1990), The Golden Age (2000), and another excursion into the ancient world: Creation (1981, published in expanded form 2002).
The second strain consists of the comedic "satirical inventions": Myron (1974, a sequel to Myra Breckinridge), Kalki (1978), Duluth (1983), (1992), and The Smithsonian Institution (1998).
Vidal occasionally returned to scriptwriting cinema 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 because 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 Keates 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 .
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 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,
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.
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.
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 have 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 claims is a conspiracy against the US public having been 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)
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
(1992) ISBN 0-14-023119-6
The Smithsonian Institution (1998) ISBN 0-375-50121-5
The Golden Age (2000) ISBN 0-375-72481-8
(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
(1983 documentary film)
Weekend In Wallop (1984)
Bob Roberts – as Senator Brickley Paiste (1992 film)
With Honors – Plays the pessimistic and right-wing Prof. Pitkannan (1994 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
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 Interview with Melvyn Bragg in New Statesman Magazine - 11 October 2010
Gore Vidal's America - Seven part interview with Gore Vidal on The Real News - (video) July 5, 2009
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:Atheism activists
Category:American atheists
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:History of United States isolationism
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
