Eugene Luther Gore Vidal (  /ˌɡɔr vɨˈdɑːl/;, born Eugene Louis Vidal, October 3, 1925 – July 31, 2012) was an American writer known for his essays, novels, screenplays, and Broadway plays.

He was also known for his patrician manner, Transatlantic accent, and witty aphorisms. Vidal came from a distinguished political lineage; his grandfather was the U.S. Senator Thomas Gore of Oklahoma.
 

Vidal was a lifelong Democrat; he ran for political office twice and was a longtime political commentator. As well known for his essays as his novels, Vidal wrote for The Nation, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books and Esquire. Through his essays and media appearances, Vidal was a longtime critic of American foreign policy. In addition to this, he characterised the United States as a decaying empire from the 1980s onwards. He was also known for his well-publicized spats with such figures as Norman Mailer, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Truman Capote.
 

His most widely regarded social novel was Myra Breckinridge; his best known historical novels included Julian, Burr, and Lincoln. His third novel, The City and the Pillar (1948), outraged conservative critics as one of the first major American novels to feature unambiguous homosexuality. Vidal always rejected the terms of "homosexual" and "heterosexual" as inherently false, claiming that the vast majority of individuals had the potential to be pansexual. His screenwriting credits included the epic historical drama Ben-Hur (1959), into which he claimed he had written a "gay subplot." Ben-Hur won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
 

At the time of his death he was the last of a generation of American writers who had served during World War II, including J.D. Salinger, Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, and Joseph Heller. Perhaps best remembered for his caustic wit, he referred to himself as a "gentleman bitch" and has been described as the 20th century's answer to Oscar Wilde.
 

Life and career

Early life

Vidal was born Eugene Louis Vidal in West Point, New York, the only child of Eugene Luther Vidal (1895–1969) and Nina Gore (1903–1978).The middle name, Louis, was a mistake on the part of his father, "who could not remember for certain whether his own name was Eugene Louis or Eugene Luther."As Vidal explained in his memoir Palimpsest (Deutsch, 1995), "... my birth certificate says 'Eugene Louis Vidal': this was changed to Eugene Luther Vidal, Jr.; then Gore was added at my christening [in 1939]; then at fourteen I got rid of the first two names."
 

Vidal was born in the Cadet Hospital of the United States Military Academy (West Point), where his father, a first lieutenant, was the first aeronautics instructor. According to Conversations with Gore Vidal, the future writer was not baptised until January 1939, at age 13, by the headmaster of St. Albans, where Vidal was attending preparatory school. The ceremony took place so Vidal "could be confirmed [into the Episcopal faith] at the Washington Cathedral in February [1939] as Eugene Luther Gore Vidal." He later stated that although Gore was added to his names at the time of the baptism, "I wasn't named for him, although he had a great influence on my life." In 1941, Vidal dropped both of his first two names, saying that he "wanted a sharp, distinctive name, appropriate for an aspiring author or national political leader. 'I wasn't going to write as Gene since there was already one. I didn't want to use the Jr.'"

 

Photo of Vidal by Carl Van Vechten, 1948
 

Vidal's father served as director of the Commerce Department's Bureau of Air Commerce (1933–1937) in the Roosevelt administration, was one of the first Army Air Corps pilots and, according to biographer Susan Butler, was the great love of Amelia Earhart's life. In the 1920s and 1930s, he was a co-founder of three American airlines: the Ludington Line, which merged with others and became Eastern Airlines, Transcontinental Air Transport (TAT, which became TWA), and Northeast Airlines, which he founded with Earhart, as well as the Boston and Maine Railroad. The elder Vidal had also been a West Point football quarterback, coach, and captain and an all-American basketball player. He also participated in the 1920 and 1924 Summer Olympics (seventh in the decathlon; U.S. pentathlon team coach).
 

Vidal's mother was a society figure who made her Broadway debut as an extra in Sign of the Leopard in 1928. She married Eugene Luther Vidal, Sr. in 1922 and divorced him in 1935.Two more marriages followed (one to Hugh D. Auchincloss, later the stepfather of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis), and, according to her son, she had "a long off-and-on affair" with actor Clark Gable. As Nina Auchincloss, she was an alternate delegate to the 1940 Democratic National Convention.
 

Vidal had four half-siblings from his parents' later marriages (Vance Vidal, Valerie Vidal, Thomas Gore Auchincloss, and Nina Gore Auchincloss) and four stepbrothers from his mother's third marriage to Army Air Forces Major General Robert Olds, who died in 1943, ten months after marrying Vidal's mother. Vidal's nephews include the brothers Burr Steers, writer and film director, and painter Hugh Auchincloss Steers (1963–1995).
 

Vidal was raised in Washington, D.C., where he attended Sidwell Friends School and then St. Albans School. Since Senator Gore was blind, his grandson read aloud to him and was often his guide. The senator's isolationism contributed a major principle of his grandson's political philosophy, which is critical of foreign and domestic policies shaped by American imperialism.

Gore attended St. Albans in 1939, but left to study in France. He returned following the outbreak of World War II and studied at the Los Alamos Ranch School in 1940, later transferring to Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire. Roy Hattersley writes, "for reasons he never explained, he did not go on to Harvard, Yale or Princeton with other members of his social class." Instead, Vidal enlisted in the US Navy, serving as a warrant officer, mostly in the North Pacific. After three years, he contracted hypothermia, developed rheumatoid arthritis and became a mess officer.
 

Personal life

Vidal had affairs with both men and women. The novelist Anaïs Nin claimed an involvement with Vidal in her memoir The Diary of Anaïs Nin but Vidal denied it in his memoir Palimpsest.

Vidal also discussed having dalliances with people such as actress Diana Lynn, and alluded to the possibility that he may have a daughter. He was briefly engaged to Joanne Woodward, before she married Paul Newman; after eloping, the couple shared a house with Vidal in Los Angeles for a short time. In 1950, he met his long-term partner Howard Austen. Vidal once reported that the secret to his lengthy relationship with Austen was that they did not have sex with each other: "It's easy to sustain a relationship when sex plays no part & impossible, I have observed, when it does."
 

According to literary critic Harold Bloom, Vidal believed his homosexuality had denied him the full recognition of the literary community. Bloom, meanwhile, claimed this had more to do with Vidal's association with the unfashionable genre of historical fiction.
 

Vidal was an atheist, and in 2009 was named honorary president of the American Humanist Association.
 

During the latter part of the twentieth century Vidal divided his time between Italy and California. In 2003, he sold his 5,000-square-foot (460 m²) Italian Villa, La Rondinaia (The Swallow's Nest) on the Amalfi Coast, and moved to Los Angeles. Austen died in November 2003 and, in February 2005, was buried in a plot for himself and Vidal at Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C.
 

Vidal died at his home in Hollywood Hills, California, at about 6:45 p.m. PDT July 31, 2012, of complications from pneumonia. He was 86.
 

Legacy

After Vidal's death tributes immediately poured in from various media sources. The New York Times described him in his obituary as being in his old age "an Augustan figure who believed himself to be the last of a breed, and he was probably right. Few American writers have been more versatile or gotten more mileage from their talent." The Los Angeles Times described him as a "literary juggernaut" whose novels and essays were considered "among the most elegant in the English language". The Washington Post remembered him as a "major writer of the modern era" and an "astonishingly versatile man of letters".
 

UK's The Guardian said "Vidal's critics disparaged his tendency to formulate an aphorism rather than to argue, finding in his work an underlying note of contempt for those who did not agree with him. His fans, on the other hand, delighted in his unflagging wit and elegant style."[94] The Daily Telegraph described him as "an icy iconoclast" who "delighted in chronicling what he perceived as the disintegration of civilisation around him", while BBC News said he was "one of the finest post-war American writers... an indefatigable critic of the whole American system.

Writing in Los Angeles, BBC journalist Alastair Leithead said: "Gore Vidal saw himself as the last of the breed of literary figures who became celebrities in their own right. Never a stranger to chat shows, his wry and witty opinions were sought after as much as his writing."
 

Popular Spanish publication Ideal reported Vidal's death as a loss to the "culture of the United States" and described him as a "Huge American novelist and essayist". The Italian Il Corriere described him as "the enfant terrible of American culture" and said that he was "one of the giants of American literature". French paper Le Figaro described him as "the Killjoy of America" but also said that he was an "outstanding polemicist" who used phrases "like high precision weapons."
 

Following his death, despite generally positive appraisals by many, Vidal has been criticized by at least one commentator as "racist and elitist" and as "forever mourning the decline of his era of aristocratic privilege