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Gore Vidal, iconoclastic author, dies at 86
Gore Vidal was impossible to categorise, which was exactly the way he liked it.
The reading public knew him as a literary juggernaut who wrote 25 novels — from the historical "Lincoln" to the satirical "Myra Breckinridge" -- and volumes of essays critics consider among the most elegant in the English language. He also brought shrewd intelligence to writing Broadway hits, Hollywood screenplays, television dramas and a trio of mysteries still in print after 50 years.
When he wasn't writing, he was popping up in movies, playing himself in "Fellini's Roma," a sinister plotter in sci-fi thriller "Gattaca" and a U.S. senator in "Bob Roberts". The grandson of a U.S. senator, he also made two entertaining but unsuccessful forays into politics, running for the Senate from California and the House of Representatives from New York.
In other spare moments, he demolished intellectual rivals like Norman Mailer and William F. Buckley Jr. with acidic one-liners, establishing himself as a peerless master of talk-show punditry.
"Style," Vidal once said, "is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn." By that definition, he was an emperor of style, sophisticated and cantankerous in his prophesies of America's fate and refusal to let others define him.
Iconoclastic author, savvy analyst and glorious gadfly on the national conscience, Vidal died Tuesday at his home in the Hollywood Hills from complications of pneumonia, his nephew Burr Steers said. He was 86.
In 1993, Vidal won the National Book Award for his massive "United States Essays, 1952-1992," a collection of erudite and infuriating critiques on politics, sexuality, religion and literature written originally for such publications as The Nation, Esquire and the New York Review of Books.
Threaded throughout his pieces are anecdotes about his famous friends and foes, who included Anais Nin, Tennessee Williams, Christopher Isherwood, Orson Welles, Truman Capote, Frank Sinatra, Jack Kerouac, Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Eleanor Roosevelt and a variety of Kennedys. I Ie counted Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Al Gore among his relatives.
Vidal began his public life at age 22 when his first novel, the World War Il-themed "Williwaw," won the wide admiration of critics. Two years later, however, the literary golden boy became an outcast with "The City and the Pillar" (1948), one of the first mainstream novels to deal frankly with homosexuality.
Ignored by book critics for the next several years, he turned to television writing, churning out dramas for prestigious showcases such as "Suspense," "Goodyear Playhouse" and "Studio One." He adapted one of these works, "Visit to a Small Planet" (1957), for the stage. A Cold War parable featuring a space alien who provokes war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, it ran on Broadway for 388 performances and was made into a movie starring Jerry Lewis.
Although Vidal often declared the novel dead, he wrote more than two dozen of them. He called books such as "Burr" (1973), "Lincoln" (1984) and "Julian" (1964) "meditations on history and politics." "Inventions" was his term for his wilder fiction, which includes the comic novel "Duluth" (1983) and the wicked spoof featuring transsexual Myra Breckinridge in the novel by the same name. Some critics consider "Myra Breckinridge" (1968) his masterpiece.
Vidal was an insider by dint of his connections in Washington, Hollywood and literary salons around the world. But he acted more as the outsider.
A fierce critic of the U.S. as a "national security state," Vidal seemed to move further into the political wilderness after the 9/11 attacks in New York and on the Pentagon, suggesting that the George W. Bush administration had colluded with the terrorists. His views turned many longtime admirers into detractors, including writer Christopher Hitchens, who denounced Vidal as a crackpot.
"Gore was an iconoclast. That was his strength," former Nation editor Victor Navasky told The Times several years ago. While some critics believed Vidal should be remembered for his essays, others, like Navasky, thought it would be for the bridges he burned.
Vidal crafted many of his diatribes at his villa in Ravello, Italy, where he lived for three decades. In 2005, he returned full time to his other longtime home, a mansion in the Hollywood I fills.
He had a lifelong fascination with Hollywood as a place of invention and reinvention, the chief motifs of his unusual life.
Vidal grew up expecting a career in national politics. "I never wanted to be a writer. I mean, that's the last thing I wanted," he once told critic Charles Ruas.
He was born Eugene Luther Gore Vidal on Oct. 3, 1925, in West Point, N.Y. His father, Eugene, was an aviation expert who taught at the U.S. Military Academy and later served as director of air commerce under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. His mother, Nina Gore, was a Washington socialite whom he portrayed as a heavy drinker with a nasty temper. The Gores divorced when Vidal was 10.
Vidal graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1943, skipped college and joined the U.S. Army. Fie trained at the Virginia Military Institute and served on a freight-supply ship in the Aleutian Islands, where he became familiar with the sudden blasts of wind called williwaws. During night watches in port he began to write "Williwaw," which earned flattering reviews and established its young author as a leading member of the post-World War II class of first-time novelists that included Mailer and Capote.
Vidal was far more successful writing about political power than acquiring it.
His first historical novel was "Julian" (1964), a bestseller about the 4th-century Roman emperor who rejected Christianity. Praised as a vivid evocation of the era, it freed Vidal from literary Siberia. He went on to re-imagine American history in "Washington, D.C.," "Burr," "1876," "Lincoln," "Empire," "Hollywood" and "The Golden Age."
" I am at heart a propagandist, a tremendous hater, a tiresome nag, complacently positive that there is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise," he said in "Gore Vidal: A Biography" (1999) by Fred Kaplan.
Despite his crushing forthrightness on many topics, Vidal preferred ambiguity in the personal realm.
SOURCE: LOS ANGELES TIMES