- Born
- 3 October 1925West Point, New York, USA
- Died
- 31 July 2012Los Angeles, USA · aged 86
Gore Vidal
A novelist and essayist whose arguments about sex and power unsettled American public life.
Gore Vidal was born in West Point, New York, in 1925. He grew up close to political life in Washington, where his grandfather was a senator, and began publishing fiction after serving in the Second World War.
His third novel, “The City and the Pillar” (1948), centred on a young man’s desire for another man. Its treatment of an apparently ordinary American attracted controversy, though the story itself remained violent and painful. The reception damaged Vidal’s early literary career without ending it.
He wrote for television and film before producing historical novels such as “Burr” and “Lincoln”, as well as the gender satire “Myra Breckinridge” (1968). Essays and television appearances made him a combative critic of American politics, military power and sexual convention. His 1968 debates with William F. Buckley became especially notorious.
Vidal resisted defining people by fixed sexual labels, distinguishing acts from identities. His longest domestic partnership was with Howard Austen, with whom he shared more than fifty years, including long periods in Italy. Vidal died in Los Angeles in 2012, aged 86, leaving a body of work as argumentative as his public persona.