GORE VIDAL

A Conversation with Gore Vidal

April 2 at 7:30pm · Mountainlair Ballroom

Gore Vidal is a novelist, essayist, playwright, and provocateur whose career has spanned six decades, beginning in the years immediately following World War II and continuing into the early years of the twenty-first century. In addition to a major sequence of seven novels about American history, and such satirical novels as Myra Breckinridge and Duluth, he has written dozens of television plays, film scripts, and Broadway plays such as Visit to a Small Planet and The Best Man. He has also written hundreds of essays, gathered in several volumes published between 1962 and 2001.

Taken as a whole, this seemingly varied work has an uncanny unity, exhibiting a tone of easy familiarity with the world of politics and letters and an urbane wit. Vidal’s lineage in American literature may be traced back to Henry James, the sophisticated American from the upper echelons of society who mingles with European sophisticates, and Mark Twain, the raw humorist and critic of American empire.

Vidal’s novel, Lincoln, is a fictional account of President Abraham Lincoln’s challenging time in office and his fight to unite a disintegrating nation. The Washington Post described the novel as a “portrait of America’s great president that is at once intimate and public, stark and complex, and that will become for future generations the living Lincoln, the definitive Lincoln.”

In his latest work, Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Vidal explores the personalities, egos, and conflicts of the founding fathers as they set up the institutions of government by which we still live. Vidal’s recent books, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated and Dreaming of War: Blood for Oil and the Bush-Cheney Junta, are collections of essays investigating the roots and causes of the terrorist crises currently facing the United States.

Vidal’s effect on American literary culture is immense, and his works have earned him a permanent place in American letters and politics. In an intimate, interview-style presentation, Vidal displays his forthrightness and wicked wit, discussing everything from current affairs and modern history to brilliant reminiscences of his extraordinary life.

For more than a quarter century, Vidal was a literary and political critic for The New York Review of Books. He has appeared as himself in the film Fellini’s Roma and co-starred with Tim Robbins in Bob Roberts. He served on the President’s Advisory Committee on the Arts and twice ran for national public office; he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.