Parini nimbly explores Vidal's fiction from the controversial Myra Breckinridge to the historical novels Lincoln, Burr, and Julian and nonfiction, such as Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson. As famous for his friends as for his writing, Vidal rubbed shoulders with Eleanor Roosevelt and John and Jacqueline Kennedy, and feuded with William F. With an elegance worthy of Vidal himself, Parini gracefully chronicles Vidal's life from his childhood (he lived in a world of fantasies shaped by the movies he saw to escape his parents' constant fighting and eventual divorce) and teenage years (he was a poor student, but always felt the siren song of writing) to the publication of his first novel, Williwaw, in 1946, and his struggles with and eventual acceptance of his homosexuality. This is the biography Gore Vidal-novelist, essayist, dramatist, screenwriter, historian, wit, provocateur, and pioneer of gay rights-has long needed.Īcclaimed biographer Parini (Robert Frost: A Life) draws on his 30 years of friendship and conversation with Gore Vidal (1925 2012), as well as on deep archival research, to offer a simultaneously admiring and candid portrait. Provided with unique access to Vidal’s life and his papers, Parini excavates many buried skeletons yet never loses sight of his deep respect for Vidal and his astounding gifts.

Jay Parini crafts Vidal’s life into an accessible, entertaining story that puts the experience of one of the great American figures of the postwar era into context, introduces the author and his works to a generation who may not know him, and looks behind the scenes at the man and his work in ways never possible before his death. The life of Gore Vidal teemed with notable incidents, famous people, and lasting achievements that call out for careful evocation and examination. Buckley, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and The New York Times, among other adversaries. Also a generous helping of feuds with the likes of William F. But there is plenty of glittering surface as well-a virtual Who’s Who of the twentieth century, from Eleanor Roosevelt and Amelia Earhart through the Kennedys, Johnny Carson, Leonard Bernstein, and the crème de la crème of Hollywood. The product of thirty years of friendship and conversation, Jay Parini’s Empire of Self digs behind the glittering surface of Gore Vidal’s colorful career to reveal the complex emotional and sexual truths underlying his celebrity-strewn life. An intimate, authorized yet totally frank biography of Gore Vidal (1925–2012), one of the most accomplished, visible, and controversial American novelists and cultural figures of the past century

Empire of self a life of gore vidal