Non-Fiction Books
For over twenty years, Gore Vidal has been one of America's most successful if unpredictable novelists. At the same time, as readers of the New York Review of Books, Esquire, The New Statesman know, he has been an outstanding literary social critic. His first collection of essays, Rocking the Boat, contained, according to Philip Rahv, "some of the most courageous, liveliest, and wittiest comment on literature, the theater and social life that has been written in America." Gore Vidal's second collection of essays has the same wide range as the first: pornography, the French "New Novel," the Kennedys, Tarzan, Nixon, the future of liberalism and the nature of conservatism, Once again, in these essays, "Gore Vidal brings," as Norman Mailer once wrote, "a brave and cultivated wit to the pomades of the national suet."
The American writer voices his opinions on influential figures as well as the ironies, illusions, and insensibility of life in the past two decades. Bibliogs
A major new collection of essays by one of America's most distinguished men of letters, including, among matters of fact, exposures of political dealings from the Adams family through Robert Moses, and, in fiction, Vidal's famous controversial study of some contemporary writers, "American Plastic," and his backward look at Tennessee Williams, "Some Memories of the Glorious Bird."
An imaginative collection of Vidal interviews given over twenty years, full of witty, brilliant, and unconventional comments on his own life and work as well as American politics, values, and sexuality
These nineteen essays richly confirm Gore Vidal's reputation as "America's finest essayist."
The author offers his personal impressions of Venice, recounts its long history, and describes the paintings, sculpture, and architecture of the city
Vidal, Gore. Armageddon ? - Essays 1983-1987. London, Andre Deutsch, 1987. Octavo. VIII, 244 pages. Original Hardcover with illustrated dustjacket in protective Mylar. Near Fine condition with only minor signs of external wear. Includes for example the following Frederic The European Connection / Tennessee Someone to Laugh at the Squares with / Richard Not The Best Man's Best Man / by Andrew Kopkind / etc.
Five novelists examine the correlation between their writing and their sense of social responsibility, emphasizing how good political fiction deepens the reader's awareness of the urgency of modern society
Vidal brings his attention to bear on a variety of subjects, from H.L. Mencken to Oscar Wilde, Ford Madox Ford and Somerset Maugham. He has fun with the letters exchanged by Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell, deals unsparingly with Colonel Oliver North, and remembers his old friend Orson Welles.
Vidal intertwines fond recollections of films savored in the movie palaces of his Washington, D.C., boyhood with strands of autobiography and trenchant observations about American politics. Never before has the renowned author revealed so much about his own life or written with such immediacy about the forces shaping America. 26 halftones.
Gore Vidal''s reputation as America''s finest essayist is an enduring one. This collection, chosen by the author from 40 years of work, contains about two-thirds of what he published in various magazines and journals. He has divided the essays into three categories, or states. State of the art covers literature, including novelists and critics, bestsellers, pieces on Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Suetonius, Nabakov and Montaigne (a previosly uncollected essay from 1992). State of the union deals with politics and public life: sex, drugs, money, Abraham Lincoln, Eleanor Roosevelt, The Holy Family (his essay on the Kennedys), Nixon, and finally Monotheism and its Discontents , a scathing critique of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. In state of being, we are given personal responses to people and events: recollections of his childhood, E. Nesbit, Tarzan, Tennessee Williams and Anais Nin.
The author of Myra Breckenridge reminisces about his life, from his school days at St. Albans and Exeter to his rise as a literary superstar, and the famous people he has known, including the Kennedys, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Reprint.
In this collection Gore Vidal addresses a wide range of topics: writers and politicians, the CIA and the American Empire, Mark Twain and George Washington, Franklin Roosevelt and Edmund Wilson. There are literary essays on Sinclair Lewis and Dawn Powell, and political pieces on America's ambivalent attitude to the UN, the disunity of the United States, and the issue of race as the global village disintegrates into fragments of uncertain national identity. Vidal's barbed pen is unsparing of reputation, whether in a savage assault on John Updike or an acidly humorous commentary on Bill Clinton. The book concludes with a claim regarding the extent of US military involvement in the British Isles.
Gore Vidal: Sexually Speaking presents the author’s often provocative and always engaging thoughts on sexuality. Here, fourteen essays and three rare, vintage interviews published over the past four decades tackle hot-button topics such as gay American founding fathers, sex and the Catholic church, gay bashing and the U.S. Congress, and bedding Jack Kerouac. “Vidal’s erudition, candor, and exceptional sense of humor shine.” ― San Francisco Chronicle
Like his National Book Award—winning United States, Gore Vidal’s scintillating ninth collection, The Last Empire , affirms his reputation as our most provocative critic and observer of the modern American scene. In the essays collected here, Vidal brings his keen intellect, experience, and razor-edged wit to bear on an astonishing range of subjects. From his celebrated profiles of Clare Boothe Luce and Charles Lindbergh and his controversial essay about the Bill of Rights–which sparked an extended correspondence with convicted Oklahoma City Bomber Timothy McVeigh–to his provocative analyses of literary icons such as John Updike and Mark Twain and his trenchant observations about terrorism, civil liberties, the CIA, Al Gore, Tony Blair, and the Clintons, Vidal weaves a rich tapestry of personal anecdote, critical insight, and historical detail. Written between the first presidential campaign of Bill Clinton and the electoral crisis of 2000, The Last Empire is a sweeping coda to the last century’s conflicted vision of the American dream.
The United States has been engaged in what the great historian Charles A. Beard called "perpetual war for perpetual peace." The Federation of American Scientists has cataloged nearly 200 military incursions since 1945 in which the United States has been the aggressor. In a series of penetrating and alarming essays, whose centerpiece is a commentary on the events of September 11, 2001 (deemed too controversial to publish in this country until now) Gore Vidal challenges the comforting consensus following September 11th and goes back and draws connections to Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. He asks were these simply the acts of "evil-doers?" Gore Vidal is the master essayist of our age. - Washington Post Our greatest living man of letters. - Boston Globe Vidal's imagination of American politics is so powerful as to compel awe. - Harold Bloom, The New York Review of Books.
In a witty and elegant autobiography that takes up where his bestelling Palimpsest left off, the celebrated novelist, essayist, critic, and controversialist Gore Vidal reflects on his remarkable life.Writing from his desks in Ravello and the Hollywood Hills, Vidal travels in memory through the arenas of literature, television, film, theatre, politics, and international society where he has cut a wide swath, recounting achievements and defeats, friends and enemies made (and sometimes lost). From encounters with, amongst others, Jack and Jacqueline Kennedy, Tennessee Williams, Eleanor Roosevelt, Orson Welles, Johnny Carson, Francis Ford Coppola to the mournful passing of his longtime partner, Howard Auster, Vidal always steers his narrative with grace and flair. Entertaining, provocative, and often moving, Point to Point Navigation wonderfully captures the life of one of twentieth-century America’s most important writers.
This new selection brings together the best of Gore Vidal's essays, comment and criticism from his fifty-year writing career. With mercurial intelligence and often courageous - and outrageous! - forthrightness, Vidal explores his keystone subjects: primarily the worlds of literature and US politics; but also showbiz, sexuality and modern manners. His gaze ranges from the fiction of Calvino and Updike to the politics of pornography to the Clinton and Bush administrations, America post-September 11 and contemporary imperial ambitions. These essays are a witty and brilliant assessment of our times from the most memorable of American literary masters.
This book is Gore Vidal's visual memoir of his remarkable and famously well-lived life. In this collection of photographs, letters, manuscripts, and other selections from Vidal's vast personal archives, readers are now escorted by one of America's wittiest insiders into the Kennedys' Camelot, as well as onto the set of Ben Hur, and into the private lives of Eleanor Roosevelt, Paul Newman, and Tennessee Williams, to name just a few. Born into public life, here Vidal looks back on his days as an Army officer in WWII, his rise as a groundbreaking and controversial novelist, his years in Hollywood, his forays into the political arena, and his notoriously public triumphs and feuds. Written with Vidal's legendary wit and literary elegance, this book reveals not only the personal reflections of one of the last of the great generation of American writers, but also a captivating social history of the 20th century told by one of our great raconteurs.
Interviews with the legendarily caustic commentator and National Book Award winner, on topics from the American empire to the national security state. If there’s a hole in the road, I will, viciously, outrageously, say there’s a hole in the road and if you don’t fill it in you’ll break the axle of your car. One is not loved for being helpful. In addition to gaining renown as one of America’s foremost essayists, screenwriters, and novelists, Gore Vidal was a terrific conversationalist―once described by Dick Cavett as “the best talker since Oscar Wilde.” This book is drawn from four interviews conducted with his long-time interlocutor, writer and radio host Jon Wiener, in which Vidal grapples with history and his own life in politics, both as a commentator and candidate. The interviews cover a twenty-year span when Vidal was at the height of his powers. His extraordinary facility for developing an argument, tracing connections between past and present, and drawing on an encyclopedic knowledge of America’s place in the world, are all on full display―as is his gloriously acerbic wit.
"I've had to smell your works from time to time." —NORMAN MAILER "I knew Norman's syndrome. If I was on the cover of Time and he wasn't, my God he would be insulting me in the press. He couldn't stop." —GORE VIDAL The most outrageous literary feud of the century, captured through rare interviews, transcripts, and correspondence Commencing at about the point where they'd become the two most famous writers in the world, Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal engaged in a vicious and oh-so-public feud that went on for decades. Their 1971 confrontation on the Dick Cavett show is probably the most famous literary encounter ever captured by television. The on-air badinage between the two was shockingly nasty, but some reports say it was even worse backstage, where Mailer reportedly "headbutted" Vidal in Cavett's greenroom. The feud, from a time when writers really mattered in American public life, is the stuff of literary legend, and Vidal vs. Mailer collects the exchanges, transcripts and interviews that document the historic rivalry. As we learn, it was a feud from the very start. Mailer recounts in a joint Esquire interview—published here in full here for the first time—that during their first meeting Vidal promised a rivalry to the death and swore that he'd surely out-live Mailer. Mailer preferred more combative and physical exchanges. At the climax of the feud in the late 1970s, Mailer encountered Vidal at a party thrown by Lally Weymouth and promptly flattened him with a punch. At which point Vidal, still on the floor, uttered what is perhaps the most immortally apt literary criticism ever: "Once again, words have failed Norman Mailer."