Quantcast
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 138
↧

Gore Vidal

December 19, 2012, 9:35 pm
$
0
0
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Gore Vidal 
(Octuber 3, 1925 - July 31, 2012)


Gore Vidal was famous for speaking his mind on the hottest issues in America and around the world. He was a prolific novelist, essayist and screen and stage play writer. He also ran for the US Senate. He was related to former US President Jimmy Carter and Nobel Prize winner Al Gore. Vidal was a strong critic of the George W. Bush administration.

Vidal was born Eugene Luther Vidal Jr. in New York in 1925. His father worked in the US Air Force and his mother was an actress. He disliked his first name and changed it to Gore when he was a teenager. He was raised and educated in Washington D.C. and spent a great deal of time learning from his grandfather, Democratic Senator Thomas Gore.

Vidal's writing career began when he was nineteen. The book 'Williwaw' was about his experiences in the military. In 1948, aged 22, he wrote his ground-breaking 'The City and the Pillar', which shocked many Americans. It was the first American novel to focus on homosexuality. The New York Times refused to review his next five books. This established Vidal's reputation for his outspokenness.

For six decades Vidal wrote commentaries on American politics and society. He has a huge following of admirers, including critic Martin Amis, who said Vidal "is learned, funny and exceptionally clear-sighted. Even his blind spots are illuminating." Vidal was a member of the World Can't Wait organization, which demands the impeachment of George W. Bush for crimes against humanity. He died in August 2012, in Hollywood Hills, California.


http://famouspeoplelessons.com/g/gore_vidal.html



Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. File:Gore Vidal by Juan F Bastos.jpg
Gore Vidal by Juan B. Bastos

Bibliography


Essays and non-fiction

Rocking the Boat (1963) 
Reflections Upon a Sinking Ship (1969) 
Sex, Death and Money (1969) (paperback compilation) 
Homage to Daniel Shays (1972) 
Matters of Fact and of Fiction (1977) 
Views from a Window Co-Editor (1981) 
The Second American Revolution (1983) 
Vidal In Venice (1985) 
Armageddon? (1987) (UK only) 
At Home (1988) 
A View From The Diner's Club (1991) (UK only) 
Screening History (1992) 
Decline and Fall of the American Empire (1992) 
United States: Essays 1952–1992 (1993) National Book Award
Palimpsest: a memoir (1995) 
Virgin Islands (1997) (UK only) 
The American Presidency (1998) 
Sexually Speaking: Collected Sex Writings (1999) 
The Last Empire: essays 1992–2000 (2001) (there is also a much shorter UK edition) 
Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace or How We Came To Be So Hated, Thunder's Mouth Press, 2002, (2002) 
Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta, Thunder's Mouth Press, (2002) 
Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson (2003) 
Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia (2004) 
Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir (2006) 
The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal (2008) 
Gore Vidal: Snapshots in History's Glare (2009)


Plays

Visit to a Small Planet (1957)
The Best Man (1960) 
On the March to the Sea (1960–1961, 2004) 
Romulus (adapted from Friedrich Dürrenmatt's 1950 play Romulus der Große) (1962) 
Weekend (1968) 
Drawing Room Comedy (1970) 
An Evening with Richard Nixon (1970) 
On the March to the Sea (2005) 

Novels

Williwaw (1946) 
Dark Green, Bright Red (1950)  (prophecy of the Guatemala coup d'état of 1954, see "In the Lair of the Octopus" Dreaming War) 
A Star's Progress (aka Cry Shame!) (1950) under the pseudonym Katherine Everard 
The Judgment of Paris (1952) 
Death in the Fifth Position (1952) under the pseudonym Edgar Box 
Thieves Fall Out (1953) under the pseudonym Cameron Kay 
Death Before Bedtime (1953) under the pseudonym Edgar Box 
Death Likes It Hot (1954) under the pseudonym Edgar Box 
Messiah (1954) 
A Thirsty Evil (1956) (short stories) 
Julian (1964) 
Two Sisters (1970) 
Burr (1973) 
Myron (1974)
1876 (1976) 
Kalki (1978)
Creation (1981) 
Duluth (1983) 
Lincoln (1984)
Empire (1987)
Hollywood (1990)
Clouds and Eclipses: The Collected Short Stories (2006) (short stories, this is the same collection as A Thirsty Evil (1956), with one previously unpublished short story —Clouds and Eclipses — added) 

Screenplays

Climax!: Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1954) (TVadaptation) 
I Accuse! (1958) 
The Scapegoat (1959) 
Ben Hur (1959) (uncredited) 
The Best Man (1964) 
Caligula (1979) 
Dress Gray (1986) 
The Sicilian (1987) (uncredited) 
Billy the Kid (1989) 


Media appearances

Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (1976 — 7 episodes) — as himself 
Profile of a Writer: Gore Vidal — RM Productions (1979 documentary film) 
Vidal in Venice — Antelope Films for Channel Four Television (1987 documentary film) 
Bob Roberts— as Senator Brickley Paiste (1992 film) 
With Honors— Plays the pessimistic and right-wing Prof. Pitkannan (1994 film) 
The Celluloid Closet (1995 documentary film)
Gattaca— Plays Director Josef in science-fiction film (1997) 
Shadow Conspiracy— Plays Congressman Paige Political Thriller (1997) 
Igby Goes Down (2001 film) — School headmaster (uncredited) 
The Education of Gore Vidal (2003) Documentary by Deborah Dickson, aired in the US on PBS
Thinking XXX (2004 documentary) 
Da Ali G Show (2004 TV) 
Why We Fight (2005 film) 
Inside Deep Throat (2005 film) 
Foreign Correspondent— with former NSW premier Bob Carr
Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra concert, August 2, 2007 — Narrated Aaron Copland's Lincoln Portrait (conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas) from a wheelchair. 
The Simpsons episode: "Moe'Moe'N'a Lisa" 
Family Guy episode: "Mother Tucker" 
Alex Jones radio show 
Jon Wiener's radio program in Los Angeles
Terrorstorm: Final Cut Special Edition (2007) 
Lateline — ABC Television Australia Interview (May 2, 2008) 
Democracy Now — interview: on the Bush Presidency, History and the "United States of Amnesia" (May 14, 2008) 
The South Bank Show (May 18, 2008) 
Hardtalk - BBC News (May 22, 2008) 
The Andrew Marr Show(May 25, 2008) 
The US is not a republic anymore (June, 2008) 
Zero: An Investigation Into 9/11 (June, 2008) 
Interview on the BBC's US Presidential Election Coverage with David Dimbleby (November 04, 2008)
"Writer Against the Grain": Gore Vidal in conversation with Jay Parini at the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar (audio, 59:09)
Real Time with Bill Maher (April 10, 2009) 
Shrink (2009 film) 
"Gore Vidal's America"on The Real News Network (December 24, 2010) 
What´s My Line? occasional guest panelist (early 1960s) 


Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Gore Vidal, the iconic writer who was almost as famous 
for his personality as his body of work, has died aged 86.
Gore Vidal, one of America's most prominent writers and intellectuals, 
has died at 86 after a life spent courting controversy at home and abroad. 

Vidal's official website posted a memoriam, and media reports cited his nephew Burr Steers as confirming the legendary American writer's death.

"Vidal died Tuesday at his home in the Hollywood Hills of complications of pneumonia," Mr Steers told the Los Angeles Times.

As egotistical and caustic as he was elegant and brilliant, the iconic writer was almost as famous for his personality as his body of work, referring to himself as a "gentleman bitch".

Among a passing generation of literary writers who were also genuine celebrities, Vidal belonged to an era of personalities of such size and appeal that even those who had not read his books knew who he was.

By the time he was 19 he had published his first novel, but it was his third novel, The City and a Pillar, which caused him the greatest angst.

A story about a young man who discovers he is homosexual, when published in 1948 it caused a scandal and was described by critics as corrupt and pornographic.

Larger than life

Famously well-connected, he rubbed shoulders and butted heads with the great writers, political figures and celebrities of his time.

Vidal considered Ernest Hemingway a joke and compared Truman Capote to a "filthy animal that has found its way into the house".

His most famous literary enemies were conservative pundit William F Buckley Jr and writer Norman Mailer, who Vidal once likened to cult killer Charles Manson.

Mailer head-butted Vidal before a television appearance and on another occasion knocked him to the ground.

Vidal and Buckley took their feud to live national television while serving as commentators at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Vidal accused Buckley of being a "pro-crypto-Nazi" while Buckley called Vidal a "queer" and threatened to punch him.

Vidal seemed to make no effort to curb his abundant ego.

In a 2008 interview with Esquire magazine Vidal said people always seemed impressed that he had met so many famous people, such as Jacqueline Kennedy and William Burroughs.

"People always put that sentence the wrong way around," he said. "I mean, why not put it the true way - that these people got to meet me, and wanted to?"

Privileged upbringing

Born Eugene Luther Vidal Jr, into a family of wealth and power, Vidal grew up in Washington, DC, where his grandfather, Democratic US senator Thomas Gore, had a strong influence on him.

The young Vidal, who eventually took his mother's surname as his first name, first developed his life-long interest in politics as he read to his blind grandfather and led him about town.

He went to exclusive private secondary schools but did not attend college.

After his parents divorced, Vidal's mother married Hugh Auchincloss, who later also became the stepfather of Jacqueline Kennedy. That connection gave Vidal access to the Kennedy White House before a falling out with the family.

After early successes, his literary career stalled due to the controversy of The City and the Pillar, and he concentrated on television and movie scripts.

But by the 1960s, Vidal had returned to his first love, novels.

Three novels came out remarkably quickly - Julian, Washington DC and Myra Breckenridge.

All of them differed in scope and scale - Julian was Roman history, Washington DC, a political novel set in the 1940's, and Myra Breckenridge a camp comedy about sexual reassignment surgery.

Land of the dull

Bigger success followed with recreations of historical US figures - such as Aaron Burr and Abraham Lincoln - that analyse where Vidal thought America fell from grace.

He once described the United States as "the land of the dull and the home of the literal" and starting in the 1960s lived much of the time in a seaside Italian villa. He moved back permanently in 2003, shortly before Howard Austen, his companion of more than 50 years, died of cancer.

In 1960 Vidal, a distant cousin of former vice president Al Gore, ran unsuccessfully for a congressional seat in New York and in 1982 failed in a bid for a California Senate seat.

Vidal also was known for his sharp essays on society, sex, literature and politics. He was especially fervent about politics and what he considered to be the death of "the American Empire".

In 2009, he won the annual Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book foundation, which called him a "prominent social critic on politics, history, literature, and culture".

He was strongly critical of the George W Bush administration, describing Mr Bush as the "stupidest man in the United States".

In 2003 he accused Mr Bush of being a religious zealot on the ABC's Sunday Profile.

"There are many bad regimes on Earth, we can list several hundred. At the moment I would put the Bush regime as one of them, but I don’t want anybody to attack the United States. Just send Bush back to Texas," he told the ABC.

Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr had a close relationship with Vidal over the years, and has told NewsRadio his death is a great loss.

"It's sad to see a polymath, someone with that wide-ranging intelligence go," he said.

"And it's sad to lose someone who was a master story teller and what we'd call a great wordsmith. I think he was the greatest essayist in America without a doubt."

In 2006  Vidal told Senator Carr in an interview for the ABC's Foreign Correspondent that America was on a "losing wicket".

"We have less and less power and less and less money," he said.

He said the American military machine had "reached entropy".

"We'll end up somewhere between Argentina and Brazil, with at least a good soccer team. That'll be about it."


ABC/Reuters

http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/international/2012-08-01/writer-gore-vidal-dead-at-86/990960

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Reflections on the life and work of Gore Vidal
1 August 2012, 6.42pm AEST

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Gore Vidal will be remembered as one of the great English language essayists of the 20th century.Mark Coggins

American author and essayist Gore Vidal died at his home on Tuesday from complications of pneumonia.

The 86 year old was the author of 25 books, including the historical novels Burr and Lincoln. He also wrote extensively about American politics, literature, religion and sexuality.

Here, academics reflect on his political, cultural and literary legacy.


Paul Giles, Challis Professor of English at the University of Sydney:

Gore Vidal, born in 1925, was two years younger than Norman Mailer, the figure who was perhaps his most obvious peer in the contemporary American literary pantheon. Like Mailer, Vidal came to intellectual maturity in the late 1940s, in a United States that had been both enriched and made more conservative by the outcome of World War II, and both of these writers went on to make lasting contributions as public intellectuals who cast a skeptical eye on America’s new military-industrial complex.

Vidal came to fame in 1948 with The City and the Pillar, one of the first American novels to treat homosexuality as normal. But his strongest works of fiction were his subsequent historical novels, where he compared American politicians such as Abraham Lincoln and Aaron Burr to figures from classical Greece and Rome, thereby repositioning US imperial history within a more extensive chronological and intellectual framework.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.


Vidal was unusual, then, because he wrote about America while resisting the pressures of American nationalism; he compared himself as an author to Voltaire and Machiavelli and, like those European figures, Vidal had a cynical sense of human behaviour as driven by a lust for power, erotic desire and darker instincts of various kinds.

This also made him a lively controversialist — he had notorious feuds with conservative commentator William Buckley Jr and bien-pensant novelist Joyce Carol Oates, among others – and he became a well-known foe of fundamentalist Christianity as well as of the Republican Party.

Vidal also became associated with the cultural radicalism of the 1960s through various comic works of fiction such as Myra Breckinridge and Two Sisters, both of which feature an array of sexual escapades, although he dissociated himself from the gay liberation movements of this time by saying that in his eyes there was no such thing as homosexual identity, only homosexual acts.

The narrator of Two Sisters perhaps sums up Vidal’s philosophy of life by claiming there is nothing “to say, finally, except that pain is bad and pleasure good, life all, death nothing.”

Vidal will perhaps be remembered longer as an essayist than as a novelist, but in both fiction and non-fiction he was an iconoclast who sought to reconceptualize more parochial American assumptions within a universalist framework, thereby linking them to the long arc of world history in a way that many domestic commentators found disorienting.


Jeff Sparrow, Editor of Overland literary journal:

Gore Vidal was many things (the “other works” list on his books generally took up a whole page: novels, plays, short stories, film scripts) but he was undoubtedly one of the finest polemicists of his era. That’s an accomplishment worth stressing, particularly in Australia, where literary essays tend to the polite and the personal. Vidal could do personal – in some ways, personal was always what he did – but he could also make a denunciation into a work of art, a talent this age depressingly often requires.

Many gay men of Vidal’s generation might have shied from public engagement for fear of sexual denunciation (as in William Buckley’s famous queer baiting episode on US television in 1968). But Vidal’s status as a kind of American aristocrat (his grandfather was Senator Thomas P. Gore; his father founded the TWA; he was a distant cousin to Al Gore, and so on) lent him a kind of splendid indifference.

“I have often thought,” he wrote in the seventies, “that the reason no-one has yet been able to come up with a good word to describe the homosexualist (sometimes known as gay, fag, queer, etc) is because he did not exist. The human race is divided into male and female. Many humans enjoy sexual relations with their own sex; many don’t; many respond to both. This plurality is the fact of our nature and not worth fretting about.”

Vidal’s essays on sexuality, imbued with refreshing unconcern for propriety, are among his best: witty, dry and invariably deadly. In a discussion of porn and feminism, he notes that, until recently, male nudes could not be published. “After all,” he deadpans, “the male – any male – is a stand-in for God, and God wears a suit at all times, or at least jockey shorts.”

In his political writing, Vidal rested heavily on his insider knowledge of the American establishment – basically, he knew everyone and had slept with most of them. He was often accused of conspiracy mongering, a charge to which he replied breezily: “There doesn’t have to be a conspiracy. I’ve met these people. They all think alike.”

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.


Though he was more a contrarian than a leftist, his patrician contempt for small-minded orthodoxies made him one of the few voices of sanity during the most delusional days of the War on Terror and the man he called “the charmingly simian George W. Bush”. In his 2002 pamphlet, Dreaming War, he discussed the beginnings of the catastrophic invasion of Afghanistan in terms of the “one per cent who own the country”, thus anticipating the rhetoric of Occupy Wall Street by nine years.

Mind you, the drum circles and street marches of Occupy would not have been his scene. In his prose, as in his life, Vidal was exquisitely elegant and controlled, a stylist’s stylist. The conclusion of his review of Tennessee Williams, another confidant of his youth, might stand in tribute to his own writing:

“[Y]our art has proved to be one of those stones that really did make it to Henge, enabling future magicians to gauge from its crafty placement not only the dour winter solstice of our last days but the summer solstice, too – the golden dream, the mimosa, the total freedom, and all that lovely time unspent now spent.”

David Smith, Lecturer in American Politics and Foreign Policy at the University of Sydney’s United States Studies Centre:

Gore Vidal was one of the great English language essayists of the 20th century.

He was a very strong critic of American intervention as foreign policy. And what was notable about him was he kept up that criticism regardless of who was in power.

This is because he didn’t come out of a radical left tradition or a Democratic Party tradition: his whole view of American foreign policy was closely linked to traditional isolationist views of the United States. His grandfather had been a senator from Oklahoma, who was strongly opposed to American involvement in World War I, and for his whole life Vidal was very much against any kind of American military intervention in the world, despite the fact that he actually served in the Navy.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.


He kept up this position all the way through the Vietnam War and the Iraq war. And what’s interesting is he would talk about the historical background to this position as well. He was a very strong defender of the America First Committee, which is a largely demonised organisation that had opposed American intervention in WWII. And going back even further, he criticised Abraham Lincoln and his role in the civil war. So he was very much against militarism and against United States intervention abroad.

Vidal came from a very elite background and constantly lamented the intellectual state of America. Even culture that’s regarded as pretty high brow – like John Updike’s novels, for example – he regarded as fairly mediocre. He was constantly writing essays about how degraded he thought American culture was.

He took all of these positions, which are guaranteed to make him fairly unpopular, but he didn’t really seem to care. This was why he was one of the great contrarian essayists of the last century. That’s his major legacy and I think it’s more important than his novels.

http://theconversation.edu.au/reflections-on-the-life-and-work-of-gore-vidal-8583


Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

↧
Search
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 138
Search