The Greatest Books

Gore Vidal

Nationality

American

Description

Eugene Luther Gore Vidal (; born Eugene Louis Vidal, October 3, 1925 – July 31, 2012) was an American writer and public intellectual known for his patrician manner, epigrammatic wit, and polished style of writing.Vidal was born to a political family; his maternal grandfather, Thomas Pryor Gore, served as United States senator from Oklahoma (1907–1921 and 1931–1937). He was a Democratic Party politician who twice sought elected office; first to the United States House of Representatives (New York, 1960), then to the U.S. Senate (California, 1982).As a political commentator and essayist, Vidal's principal subject was the history of the United States and its society, especially how the militaristic foreign policy reduced the country to a decadent empire. His political and cultural essays were published in The Nation, the New Statesman, the New York Review of Books, and Esquire magazines. As a public intellectual, Gore Vidal's topical debates on sex, politics, and religion with other intellectuals and writers occasionally turned into quarrels with the likes of William F. Buckley Jr. and Norman Mailer. Vidal thought all men and women are potentially bisexual.As a novelist Vidal explored the nature of corruption in public and private life. His polished and erudite style of narration readily evoked the time and place of his stories, and perceptively delineated the psychology of his characters. His third novel, The City and the Pillar (1948), offended the literary, political, and moral sensibilities of conservative book reviewers, with a dispassionately presented male homosexual relationship. In the historical novel genre, Vidal re-created in Julian (1964) the imperial world of Julian the Apostate (r. AD 361–63), the Roman emperor who used general religious toleration to re-establish pagan polytheism to counter the political subversion of Christian monotheism. In the genre of social satire, Myra Breckinridge (1968) explores the mutability of gender role and sexual orientation as being social constructs established by social mores. In Burr (1973) and Lincoln (1984), the protagonist is presented as "A Man of the People" and as "A Man" in a narrative exploration of how the public and private facets of personality affect the national politics of the United States.

Wikipedia

Link

Gender

Male

The best books of all time by Gore Vidal

  1. 587 . United States: Essays 1952-1992 by Gore Vidal

    Image of United States: Essays 1952-1992

    United States: Essays 1952-1992

    -

  2. 1168 . Myra Breckinridge by Gore Vidal

    Image of Myra Breckinridge

    Myra Breckinridge is a 1968 satirical novel by Gore Vidal written in the form of a diary. Described by the critic Dennis Altman as "part of a major cultural assault on the assumed norms of gender a...

  3. 1923 . Burr by Gore Vidal

    Image of Burr

    Burr is the opening volume in Gore Vidal's great fictional chronicle of American history, each of which is being republished in the Modern Library . Burr From the Hardcover edition.

    - Google

  4. 1993 . Julian by Gore Vidal

    Image of Julian

    The remarkable bestseller about the Roman emperor who famously tried to halt the spread of Christianity, "Julian" is widely regarded as one of Gore Vidal's finest historical novels.

    - Google

Copyright 2009-2023 Shane Sherman
Privacy Policy