Gore Vidal

Some sort of afterlife

May 2024, no. 464

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) emphatically rejected any conventionally religious version of an afterlife. In an essay, ‘Armageddon?’ (1987), he contrasted his own view on the matter with that of Norman Mailer. ‘[B]ecause there is no cosmic point to the life that each of us perceives on this distant bit of dust at galaxy’s edge, all the more reason for us to maintain in proper balance what we have here. Because there is nothing else.’ Five years later, in Screening History, a meditation on the significance of cinema in his own life, Vidal suggested that the medium of film offers an alternative possibility of immortality.

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Every Time a Friend Succeeds Something Inside Me Dies: The Life of Gore Vidal by Jay Parini

by Kevin Rabalais •

September 2015, no. 374

Kevin Rabalais reviews 'Every Time a Friend Succeeds Something Inside Me Dies' by Jay Parini

You could call central casting for a debonair man of letters, but they’d never send someone as perfect for the role as Gore Vidal. By the time the stylish, sharp-witted – and yes, Hollywood-handsome – Vidal turned twenty-one, he had already served as first mate on a US supply ship in the Aleutian Islands duri ...

Political Animal: Gore Vidal on power by Heather Neilson

by James McNamara •

December 2014, no. 367

James McNamara reviews 'Political Animal: Gore Vidal on power' by Heather Neilson

American writer Gore Vidal was an intimate of political power. His grandfather was a US senator; his father served as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Director of Air Commerce. When his mother remarried, to Hugh Auchincloss, Vidal obtained a descendant of Vice President Aaron Burr as a stepfather ...

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Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir, 1964 to 2006 by Gore Vidal

by Peter Rose •

June 2007, no. 292

Peter Rose reviews 'Point to Point Navigation: A memoir, 1964 to 2006' by Gore Vidal

It was David Marr who commented that the key character in Gore Vidal’s first memoir, Palimpsest (1995), was not Jimmie Trimble, the boy whom Vidal loved when they were at school and who died, aged eighteen, at the battle for Iwo Jima; nor Vidal’s blind and adored maternal grandfather, Senator Thomas Pryor Gore, whom young Gore would lead onto the floor of the Senate; nor his life partner of half a century, Howard Auster; not even the audacious and polymathic Gore himself. The star of the book was in fact Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, who was dying when Vidal began to write Palimpsest.

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