Gore Vidal: Encyclopedia II - Gore Vidal - Writing career

Gore Vidal - Writing career

At age 21, he published his first novel, Williwaw, based upon his military experiences in the Alaskan Harbor Detachment. The book was well received. A few years later, his novel The City and the Pillar, which dealt candidly with gay themes, caused a furor, to the extent that the daily New York Times refused to review a number of his later books. The book was dedicated to "J.T." who, after rumors were published in a magazine, Vidal was eventually forced to confirm was his St. Albans love Jimmie Trimble and who the book clearly involved. Trimble died in the Battle of Iwo Jima June 1, 1945, and Vidal would later claim that he was the only person he ever loved. Subsequently, as sales of his novels slipped, Vidal worked on plays, films, and television series as a scriptwriter. Two of his plays, The Best Man and Visit to a Small Planet, were Broadway hits and, adapted, successful movies.

In the early 1950s, using the pseudonym Edgar Box, he wrote three mystery novels about a fictional detective named Peter Sergeant.

Vidal was hired as a contract writer for MGM in 1956. In 1959, Director William Wyler needed work done on the script of Ben-Hur, written by Karl Tunberg. Vidal agreed to work with Christopher Fry to rework the screenplay on the condition that MGM let him out of the last two years of his contract. The death of the producer, Sam Zimbalist, however, led to complications in allotting the credit. The Screenwriters Guild resolved the issue by listing Tunberg as the sole screenwriter, denying credit to both Vidal and Fry. Charlton Heston was less than pleased with the (carefully and deliberately veiled) homosexuality of a scene Vidal claims to have written and has denied that Vidal had significant involvement in the script.[1]

In the 1960s, Vidal wrote three highly successful novels. The meticulously researched Julian (1964) dealt with the apostate Roman Emperor, while Washington, D.C. (1967) focused on a political family during the FDR era. The third novel was unexpected–the satirical transsexual comedy Myra Breckinridge (1968).

After two unsuccessful plays, Weekend (1968) and An Evening With Richard Nixon (1972), and the strange semi-autobiographical novel Two Sisters, Vidal would focus mainly on his essays and two distinct strains of his novels: historical novels dealing with American history such as 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); and the funny and often merciless "satirical inventions": Myron (1975, a sequel to Myra Breckinridge), Kalki (1978), Duluth (1983), Live From Golgotha (1992) and The Smithsonian Institution (1998).

Vidal also occasionally returned to write for cinema and television including a TV movie of Billy the Kid with Val Kilmer and a mini-series of Lincoln. He also wrote the original script for the controversial film Caligula, but later had his name removed because the director and the lead actor re-wrote the script changing, the overall tone and theme, but ironically, in a failed attempt to restore Vidal's vision during the post-production, the producers of the film ended up turning it into something neither Vidal, Brass or McDowell had in mind.

Perhaps contrary to his own wishes, Vidal is more respected as an essayist than novelist. He writes chiefly on political, historical, and literary themes. He won the National Book Award in 1993 for United States (1952-1992). A subsequent collection to 2000 is The Last Empire. Since then he has published "pamphlets" highly critical of the present Bush-Cheney administration as well as the text on America's founding fathers, Inventing A Nation. He published a well-received memoir, Palimpsest in 1995, and according to recent reports is working on the follow-up.

In the 1960s, Vidal moved to Italy and was cast as himself in Federico Fellini's film Roma. His liberal politics are well-documented and in 1987 he wrote a series of essays entitled Armageddon, exploring the intricacies of power in contemporary America, and ruthlessly pillorying the presidential incumbent Ronald Reagan, whom he once famously described as a "triumph of the embalmer's art". Besides his politician grandfather, Vidal has other connections to the Democratic Party; his mother, Nina, married Hugh D. Auchincloss, Jr., who later became the stepfather of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. Vidal is a 5th cousin of Jimmy Carter. He was also an unsuccessful Democratic candidate for Congress in 1960, losing a very close election in a traditionally Republican district on the Hudson River. He lost a second attempt in 1982, despite the backing of such liberal celebrities as Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Vidal has said that he and Al Gore, the former U.S. vice president, are distant cousins, but genealogical research has uncovered no such family link.

He co-starred in the 1992 film, Bob Roberts, with Tim Robbins, as well as other films, notably Gattaca, With Honors and Igby Goes Down.

Vidal is noted as a self-publicist and if a more accurate definition of his view on things were required, it is neatly summed up in the tongue-in-cheek assertion from a magazine interview: "There is not one human problem that could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise."

In August 2004, The New York Times reported that Vidal, now 79, was selling his 5,000 square foot (460 m²) cliff-side villa in Italy, which had been his principal residence for 30 years, for health reasons and was moving permanently to his other home in Los Angeles.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Writing career", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki