Gore Vidal Biography Quotes 50 Report mistakes

Early Life and Family
Gore Vidal was born Eugene Luther Gore Vidal Jr. on October 3, 1925, at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York. He came from a family steeped in politics and public life. His maternal grandfather, Thomas Pryor Gore, was a founder of Oklahoma and one of the state's first U.S. senators, blind from young adulthood and reliant on others to read to him in the Senate offices. Vidal's father, Eugene Luther Vidal, was an aviation pioneer and government official in the early years of American civil aviation. His mother, Nina Gore, was a socialite whose later marriages connected Vidal to a wide network of prominent families. Through her marriage to Hugh D. Auchincloss, Vidal briefly shared a household that would later intersect with the Bouvier and Kennedy families, a reminder of how often his private world overlapped with the public stage.

Education and Wartime Service
Vidal grew up partly in Washington, D.C., spending long hours in the corridors of power as a guide and reader for his grandfather. He attended St. Albans School, where his love of history and literature deepened. During World War II he served in the U.S. Army, with a posting in the Aleutian Islands. The bleak landscapes and harsh weather of that assignment provided raw material for his first novel, and the experience fixed in him the cool, observant tone that would mark his later work.

First Books and Early Controversy
His debut, Williwaw (1946), drew directly from his wartime service and was praised for its clarity and restraint. Two years later he published The City and the Pillar (1948), a novel that treated same-sex desire with unusual candor for its time. The book stirred controversy and contributed to a period in which some major outlets were reluctant to review his work. Vidal moved nimbly, producing three successful mystery novels under the pseudonym Edgar Box, which kept him in print and of interest to a wide audience while he regrouped. He remained unapologetic about both the themes he explored and the tone he brought to them, insisting on literature's right to range across all of human experience.

Stage, Screen, and Television
Vidal crafted a parallel career in theater, film, and television. His play The Best Man (1960), a drama of presidential nominating politics, distilled his intimate knowledge of American power and became a staple of Broadway and later a film starring Henry Fonda and Cliff Robertson. Visit to a Small Planet began as a television piece and became a hit on stage before its 1960 film adaptation with Jerry Lewis. He wrote the teleplay The Death of Billy the Kid, later adapted into the film The Left Handed Gun with Paul Newman. In Hollywood he contributed to screenplays, sometimes uncredited, and adapted works by others with a sharp ear for dialogue. These forays kept him in the cultural conversation and honed the public voice he would use as a commentator.

Narratives of Empire and Historical Imagination
From the 1960s onward Vidal embarked on an ambitious reimagining of U.S. history in a series he called Narratives of Empire. Washington, D.C. (1967) set the tone, followed by Burr (1973), 1876 (1976), and Lincoln (1984), along with Empire (1987), Hollywood (1990), and The Golden Age (2000). In these novels he used real and invented figures to probe the interplay of personality, ambition, and institutional power. Outside the series he wrote historical fiction such as Julian (1964), about the Roman emperor known as the Apostate, and Creation (1981), a panoramic journey through the worlds of ancient Persia, India, and China. Satirical works like Myra Breckinridge (1968) showed another facet of his imagination, irreverent and formally inventive.

Essayist and Public Intellectual
Vidal's essays secured his reputation as one of the most incisive American prose stylists of the late twentieth century. Collected in volumes culminating in United States: Essays 1952-1992, which won the National Book Award in 1993, they survey literature, politics, media, and the myths of American self-regard. He was a master of the caustic aside and the sweeping historical analogy. On television he sparred memorably with William F. Buckley Jr. during coverage of the 1968 political conventions, exchanges that crystallized cultural and ideological divides. He debated and feuded by turns with contemporaries like Norman Mailer and Truman Capote, and he kept up warm friendships with writers such as Tennessee Williams and Christopher Isherwood. Whether in essays, interviews, or on programs hosted by figures such as Dick Cavett, he insisted that American power be scrutinized rather than celebrated, coining epigrams that lingered in public memory.

Politics and Campaigns
Vidal's interest in politics was not merely literary. In 1960 he ran for the U.S. House of Representatives from New York as a Democrat, waging a vigorous but unsuccessful campaign. In 1982 he entered the California Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate; he did not win the nomination, but the bid reinforced his image as a citizen-writer who believed ideas ought to be tested in the public square. Even when not running, he weighed in on policy, civil liberties, and the uses of American military power. Later essay collections, including Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace and Dreaming War, took aim at what he saw as the drift toward empire and the erosion of constitutional norms.

Views on Sexuality and Culture
Vidal resisted fixed categories around identity, arguing that human behavior, not labels, should be the focus of inquiry. He returned to questions of gender, desire, and performance in novels like Myra Breckinridge and its sequel Myron. In memoirs such as Palimpsest and later Point to Point Navigation he described formative relationships and the complicated weave of love, friendship, and memory. He wrote with particular poignancy about a youthful love lost during the Second World War, a theme that threaded through his sense of time and loss.

Personal Life
For more than half a century Vidal's closest companion was Howard Austen, with whom he shared homes in Italy and the United States. They kept a household at La Rondinaia, a dramatic cliffside villa in Ravello on the Amalfi Coast, where writers, actors, and politicians visited, and later in the Hollywood Hills. Vidal cultivated the image of the worldly observer, present at events yet slightly apart, and Austen's steadfast presence helped sustain that balance. Family remained part of his narrative too; the long shadow of his grandfather T. P. Gore, the aviation exploits of his father Eugene, and the social orbit of his mother Nina provided context for his fascination with power and pedigree.

Later Years and Legacy
In his final decades Vidal returned frequently to American history, completing The Golden Age and issuing essay collections that revisited themes from his earliest work. He traveled widely on lecture tours, and his public interventions retained their bite. After Austen's death in 2003, he spent more time in California, continuing to write and to appear in documentaries and interviews that surveyed his era. Gore Vidal died in Los Angeles on July 31, 2012, at the age of 86.

Vidal left a body of work that straddles genres with unusual ease: novels that reconfigure national memory, plays that anatomize political theater, screenplays and teleplays that sharpen public satire, and essays that model a combative, learned prose. Around him clustered figures who shaped postwar letters and politics, from William F. Buckley Jr. and Norman Mailer to Tennessee Williams, Paul Newman, Jerry Lewis, and Henry Fonda. He delighted in the clash of ideas and distrusted easy consensus. For readers and viewers who came after, he offered a model of the writer as citizen: a participant in history, an anatomist of power, and a stylist who believed that the precise use of language is itself a form of public service.

Our collection contains 50 quotes who is written by Gore, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Motivational - Truth - Justice - Love.

Other people realated to Gore: William F. Buckley, Jr. (Journalist), Norman Mailer (Novelist), James Earl Jones (Actor), Kristin Davis (Actress), Melvyn Douglas (Actor)