Gore vidal net worth
- •
Gore Vidal
(1925-2012)
Who Was Gore Vidal?
American writer Gore Vidal is known for many popular screenplays, plays and novels, as well as other literary works. He wrote and published more than 200 essays and 24 novels throughout his career, which included a venture into politics, a stint as a popular talk-show guest and even running for political office. Among Vidal's most famous works are the 1960s books Julian and Myra Breckinridge; the 1984 novel Lincoln; his 1993 political work United States: Essays 1952-1992, for which he won the National Book Award; and his 1995 memoir, Palimpsest.
Early Life and Education
Vidal was born as Eugene Luther Vidal Jr. on October 3, 1925, at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York. Vidal became very close to his grandfather, Senator T. P. Gore, at a young age. He often read to his grandfather as a boy, and soon developed a fondness for both literature and politics. Vidal's father, Eugene Vidal, a former All-American football player and track star, worked under U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, heading the
- •
In a biography of his life, Gore Vidal is a more sympathetic figure than in his own memoir.
[Author's Note: This is an expanded version of a review that appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Sunday, Nov. 14, 1999.]
FRED KAPLAN BEGINS his mammoth biography of Gore Vidal - the novelist, essayist, playwright, politician, historian, actor and conscience of America - with the one subject his protagonist fears and in the one place he never wants to be, although even the formidable Vidal can't prevent himself from ending up there some day.
The scene is Rock Creek Park Cemetery, Washington, D.C., where Vidal and Howard Austen, his companion since the early 1950s, have come to see the burial plots that Vidal chose as their side-by-side final resting place.
The choice is not arbitrary: This site is equidistant from the graves of Henry Adams, whom Vidal admired, and Jimmie Trimble, the grade school boy whom Vidal loved when they were 14, never (he claims) to have loved again.
Kap
- •
Review
Praise for Empire of Self:
“The incomparable wit, the literary genius, the dazzling friends, the staggering output, the politics, the sex, the drink, the dreadful mother and the awful last days—it's all here. It's like, for a time, enjoying Gore's priceless company again. This is as good as biography gets.”
—Dick Cavett
"Though Mr. Parini says he didn’t want to write a memoir of his friendship with Vidal, it’s when he does so that Empire of Self is at its finest.... Vidal had at one point asked Mr. Parini to be his literary executor. When Vidal died, Mr. Parini says he was relieved to discover that this burdensome task had not been left to him. 'The problem,' he writes, 'was that nobody assumed this role.' But in this book he essentially did."
—The New York Times
"Marvelous.... Given Vidal’s sensitivity to any slight, real or imagined, Parini wisely declined an offer that he write his story during his lifetime. The wait has allowed the author, whose friendship with Vidal began in the 1980s, to produce a portrait that is both affectionate and balanced."
—The Economist
Copyright ©damtree.pages.dev 2025