The political and philosophical reflections in the works by Gore Vidal

Eugene Luther Gore Vidal (1925 – 2012) is an American author of novels, stage plays, screenplays, and essays. The scion of a prominent political family, Gore is a trenchant critic of the American political establishment. Gore wrote the The City and the Pillar in 1948, which created controversy as the first major American novel to feature unambiguous homosexuality.

He was born Eugene Luther Gore Vidal in West Point, New York, the only child of Eugene Luther Vidal Sr. (1901–1969) and the former Nina S. Gore (1903–1978). His birth took place at the Cadet Hospital of the United States Military Academy, where his father was the school's first aeronautics instructor, and he was christened by the headmaster of St. Albans, the preparatory school he would attend in his youth. His second middle name honors his maternal grandfather, Thomas P. Gore, Democratic senator from Oklahoma.

Vidal was raised in Washington, D.C., where he attended St. Albans School. Since Senator Gore was blind, the young Vidal read aloud to him and became his guide, thereby gaining an access, unusual for a child, to the corridors of power. The senator's steadfast isolationism contributed to one of the major principles underlying Vidal's political philosophy, which has been consistently critical of what he perceives as a foreign (and, by extension, a domestic) policy shaped by the imperatives of American imperialism. After graduating from Phillips Exeter Academy, Vidal joined the US Army Reserve in 1943.

For much of the late twentieth century, Vidal divided his time between Ravello, Italy, on the Amalfi Coast and Los Angeles, California. In 2003, he sold his 5,000 square foot (460 m²) cliffside Ravello villa (La Rondinaia, The Swallow's Nest) for health reasons, and currently resides in Los Angeles.

Vidal is an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society.

The man, whom a Newsweek critic later described as "the best all-around man of letters since Edmund Wilson", began his writing career at age of twenty-one with publication of the novel Williwaw, based upon his military experiences in the Alaskan Harbor Detachment; conventionally realistic, the novel was well-received. A few years later, his pioneering novel The City and the Pillar, candidly dealing with gay themes, caused a furor, and 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 eventually confirmed they referred to his St. Albans love, Jimmie Trimble, who had been killed in the Battle of Iwo Jima on June 1, 1945. He later claimed Trimble was the only person with whom he had ever been in love. Subsequently, as sales of his novels diminished, Vidal wrote plays, films, and television series as a scriptwriter. Two such plays, The Best Man and Visit to a Small Planet, were Broadway successes and later successful movies.

In the early 1950s, writing under the pseudonym 'Edgar Box', he wrote three mystery novels about a fictional public relations man named "Peter Cutler Sargeant II".

In 1956, Vidal was hired as a contract screenwriter for MGM.

In the 1960s, Vidal wrote three highly successful novels. The first, the meticulously researched 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 as daring as it was unexpected and outlandish; the satirical transsexual comedy Myra Breckinridge (1968), an inventive, often hilarious 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, Richard Cromwell, of whom he wrote, "was so satisfyingly tortured in The Lives of a Bengal Lancer."

After two commercially unsuccessful plays, Weekend (1968) and An Evening With Richard Nixon (1972), and the largely unappreciated novel Two Sisters, 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' titles include Burr (1973), 1876 (1976), Lincoln (1984), Empire (1987), Hollywood (1989), 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 and often merciless "satirical inventions": Myron (1975, 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 scriptwriting cinema and television, including the television movie 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 re-wrote the script, changing the tone and themes significantly. The producers later made a futile attempt to salvage some of Vidal's vision during post-production.

Contrary to his wishes, Vidal is — at least in the U.S. — more respected as an essayist than as a novelist. The critic John Keates, echoing the general, if grudging, consensus, praised him as "this [the twentieth] century's finest essayist." Even an occasionally hostile critic like Martin Amis has admitted, "Essays are what he is good at... [h]e is learned, funny and exceptionally clear-sighted. Even his blind spots are illuminating."

Accordingly, for six decades, Gore Vidal has applied his wit, intelligence, polymathy, and inimitable voice to a wide variety of socio-political, sexual, historical, and literary themes. In 1987, Vidal wrote the essays titled Armageddon?, exploring the intricacies of power in contemporary America and ruthlessly pilloried the incumbent president Ronald Reagan as a "triumph of the embalmer's art." In 1993, he won the National Book Award for 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, powerful critiques of American expansionism, the military-industrial complex, the national security state, and the current administration. Vidal also wrote an historical essay about the U.S.'s founding fathers, Inventing A Nation. In 1995, he published a critically well-received 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 homosexual relations in such books as The City and The Pillar, Vidal is often seen as an early and unrelenting champion of sexual liberation. Sexually Speaking: Collected Sex Writings, a representative sampling of his views, contains literary and cultural essays that document his long campaign to mock and subvert conventional American attitudes toward sex. Focusing on the anti-sexual heritage of Judaeo-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 "although our notions about what constitutes correct sexual behavior are usually based on religious texts, those texts are invariably interpreted by the rulers in order to keep control over the ruled." In repudiating this kind of rigid, narrow moralism, Vidal argues that "sex is a continuum" made up of "different phases along life’s way" and thus "everyone is potentially bisexual." He explains that "the human race is divided into male and female. Many human beings enjoy the sexual relations with their own sex, many don't; many respond to both. The plurality is the fact of our nature and not worth fretting about." Therefore, "there are no homosexual people, only homosexual acts." Given the diversity of human desire, Vidal predictably resists any effort to categorize him as exclusively "homosexual" – either as writer or human being – and instead celebrates this polymorphous eroticism as natural and inevitable.

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