From Library Journal
Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Queens College and CUNY's Graduate Center, Kaplan relied on interviews, newsreel and TV footage, and full access to Vidal's papers for this biography.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Details are copious in this edifying portrait of one of America's most accomplished writers. The strength of Kaplan as a biographer (author of Dickens [1990] and Henry James [1992]) lies in his ability to weave considerable information into a smooth, interpretive account. Vidal sprang from a distinguished family--his grandfather was a well-known U.S. senator from Oklahoma--and his childhood and adolescence were cushioned by financial privilege. But he was not close to his parents, and we see in the growing boy the adult man: self-involved and emotionally detached (despite, in adulthood, the continued presence of a long-term companion). But, of course, these traits were ameliorated by his charm and good looks. Vidal's desire to write surfaced early, as did an abiding interest in politics, and he has remained involved in both arenas throughout his life. Vidal is essentially homosexual, but that did not keep him from experiencing intense relationships with women, the famous expatriate writer Anais Nin chief among them. His list of writings includes not only novels, for which he is most celebrated, but also plays and essays, and he has been able to support himself by his literary output, a blessing that has given him considerable flexibility in where he chooses to live and visit. He has certainly known many people--mostly, the rich and famous--and Kaplan is not reticent about mentioning them all; however, he often throws in a little too much detail. Nevertheless, a major literary biography of this season. Brad Hooper
From Kirkus Reviews
Although Kaplan has declared, ``I prefer my subjects dead,'' such as Dickens (1988) and Henry James (1992), he more than rises to the task in this lively biography of the prolific, controversial author. Vidal's own anecdotal, rather pitiless memoir, Palimpsest (1995), covered a little over halfway through his life, having beaten one failed biographic attempt, and left many wanting more. Kaplan delivers a volume almost as long as his The Essential Gore Vidal (1999) and longer than his previous well-received efforts. With Kaplan's near-total access to Vidal's papers, reams of interviews, and assured editorial independence, Vidal's privileged Washingtonian background and ever-changing literary career, plus his talent for literary blood sports, make him as natural and fascinating a subject for a biography as for headlines. Grandson of Oklahoma's first senator and son of a Roosevelt cabinet director, Eugene Luther Gore Vidal Jr. showed little promise despite exclusive schooling, had a noncombatant tour of duty in WWII, and then immediately succeeded with his first novel, Williwaw. In Vidal's metamorphosis from promising young writer to perennial enfant terrible, only a few holes arise here and there, such as his breaking off an engagement with his high school sweetheart and his depression after the mixed reception of his third novel. Kaplan's talent for setting social milieus keeps up with the innumerable names that drop in and out of Vidal's life (including Tennessee Williams, Anas Nin, Paul Bowles, and Paul Newman, to name just a few), though he refrains from assessing in depth Vidal's place in the assorted creative scenes in which he figured so prominently, such as playwriting, screenwriting, the bestseller, and the polemical essay. While frank about Vidal's homosexuality, Kaplan tastefully avoids psychologizing, though the psychodramas of Vidal's relationship with his narcissistic mother and his feuds with William F. Buckley Jr., Truman Capote, and Norman Mailer are juicily tempting. A rich chronicle of a celebrated career not yet in past tense. (50 b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
"Fascinating--. Vidal's life is so full of incident and celebrity, so much at the center of power and glamour, Kaplan's book is a pageant of entertaining stories."--The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"Kaplan must be commended...a splendid job."--San Francisco Chronicle
"An invaluable font of research."--The Washington Post
From the Trade Paperback edition.
From the Inside Flap
ltural critic, essayist, historian, comic satirist, image maker, provocateur, actor, homosexual, bisexual...controversial, brilliant, confrontational, unflinching, cynical, idealistic...finding words to describe Gore Vidal is never difficult. And yet, an accurate picture of this multifaceted chameleon has eluded us until now. Here, at last, is a vastly entertaining biography of an American icon.
From his Washington childhood, a world of high political and social connections and domestic turmoil, to his Exeter education and U.S. Army experiences; from his Hollywood and television career to his literary life as a novelist, playwright, and essayist; from his friendships and feuds with Tennessee Williams, Anaïs Nin, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and William Buckley to his exploration of homosexuality and celebration of bisexuality; from his cool satirical analyses of "the rich, the famous and the powerful" to his projection of himself onto the national stage of television talk
About the Author
Fred Kaplan is Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the critically acclaimed author of the biographies Henry James, Dickens, and Thomas Carlyle (which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize), and the editor of The Essential Gore Vidal. Kaplan has held Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, received a Queens College Presidential Award, and been a Fellow of the National Humanities Center. He is currently at work on a biography of Mark Twain. Kaplan lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Origins: 1776-1925
GORE VIDAL'S last name is his father's family name, his first his mother's. Born October 3, 1925, at West Point, New York, he was named, and thirteen years later baptized by the canon of Washington's Episcopalian National Cathedral Church, Eugene Luther Gore Vidal, Jr. His father, who had a poor memory for such things, could not remember for certain whether his own name was Eugene Louis or Eugene Luther. He mistakenly put Louis rather than Luther on his son's birth certificate. His exasperated son remarked, years later, that since his father was then an instructor at West Point, "He might have asked the head of his department what his name was. "You know, I've forgotten my name. Could you tell me?'" At his baptism the Luther was restored. He also added, as another middle name, his mother's maiden name. His maternal grandfather, Thomas Pryor Gore, the young boy's highest model of worldly achievement, was a United States senator. Then, at the age of sixteen, Eugene Luther Gore Vidal, Jr., decided that a partial act of self-naming would anoint him with the best of both traditions. 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." He dropped his first two names and the Jr. Thenceforth he was, so to speak, just Gore Vidal.
The Gore family saga is aggressively American, mostly Southern and Southwestern. When, in the early seventeenth century, the first Gores arrived in America from their Protestant Anglo-Irish origins, one brother went to New England, the other to Maryland, apparently never to meet again. The brothers probably came from Ireland, where the English Gores (of whom there were many) had been awarded land for service to the crown. They settled in Donegal, resolutely Anglo-Irish and anti-Catholic. Where they originally came from in England is unclear; so too is the nature of their service to the crown, though it probably had something to do with putting down the Irish. In Maryland, James Gore flourished, the patronymic father of seemingly innumerable farmers, ministers, lawyers, doctors, teachers, soldiers, politicians--three hundred years of ambitious, stubbornly assertive individualists. English and Irish origins faded into family legend and historical mist. They later associated themselves with the category Scots-Irish, which proved useful to those who wanted to make clear that though they were from Ireland, they were not Catholics. From generation to generation American Gores were to have names like James, Thomas, Manning, Austen, Albert, Notley, Elias, Ellis, Ezekiel.
The immigrant James and his immediate descendents leased and owned substantial tracts of land in what is now part of central Washington and in the Georgetown-Rock Creek Park area. They fought in the French and Indian and then in the Revolutionary War, by the time of the latter apparently staunchly anti-British. They were fruitful and multiplied. As each died, land had to be divided or sold or both. Each needed a property, a stake, an opportunity. Fortunately, there was always land to the west. Toward the end of the French and Indian War, one of the immigrant James's grandsons, Thomas, was granted or bought land in South Carolina. Selling extensive property in Maryland, part of the large family moved, before the Revolution began, southward and westward, to Chester County, near Spartanburg, in northwestern South Carolina. Thomas Tindal Gore, perhaps Thomas Gore's nephew, the son of his brother Manning, was born in South Carolina in the celebratory year 1776, and became the patriarch of the next generation. With his wife, by whom he had eight sons and five daughters, he raised cotton along the fertile banks of the Sandy River. In 1817, in wagons, Thomas Tindal moved his family south and westward, probably looking for better land, more land, more autonomy, some release for a combination of restlessness and ambition. His willful individualism traveled with the word of his Methodist God and the assumption that the Gores were a chosen people. Once more there was someplace better to the west. White American settlers and their government in Washington had from the beginning conspired to buy or conquer (whichever was more practical) the lands between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mississippi River.
First the Thomas Tindal Gores went to Alabama, on the northwestern border of Alabama with Mississippi, where whites were rapidly replacing Indians. Apparently Thomas Gore kept an inn and ran a livery barn in Pickens County. In 1830 he was elected a county commissioner and then ran for the Alabama state senate. In 1840 the patriarch took part of his family directly westward into north-central Mississippi to Choctaw County, which had once been the heartland of the Choctaw Indian nation. Some Choctaws remained behind, never to be assimilated, but most were forced farther west, by economic and military pressure, across the river to what was later to be part of Oklahoma. With other white settlers, the Gores seized the opportunity. Thomas Tindal Gore purchased from a Choctaw Indian for two hundred dollars a large property along the Yalobusha River in what is now Calhoun City, then a hardscrabble frontier town in a county in which the land was tough, resistant, and hilly, and no one wealthy. As the Gores moved westward, they farmed whatever was the best local crop of the region. They preached the Word. They healed the sick. They were quick-tongued, sharp-witted, smart. They talked and argued and argued and talked, sometimes for sport, always with passion. Thomas Tindal Gore's descendants were soon to fight (and some to die) in the Civil War, regional patriots, small slaveowners, hill-country farmers, Methodist ministers, noticeably idealistic, argumentative, hot-tempered, and clannishly loyal. "If a snake should bite one Gore, the entire family would swell from it." They were mostly unionists who found themselves trapped by local patriotism and pressure into fighting an enemy with whose underlying principle of national union they agreed. When the war came, they did their duty. They cared little about freeing slaves; they themselves had few or none. Plantation life and rule from Richmond were as alien as Northern factories and rule from Washington. But local autonomy was a rallying principle. Fighting for home rule, numbers of Gores were killed in battle.
Thomas Tindal's thousands of Calhoun County acres had to be divided among a large number of heirs, the most memorable of whom was Ezekiel Fletcher Gore, Gore Vidal's great-great-grandfather, an evangelist at the distant end of the Second Great Awakening, nicknamed "Rock," a Methodist minister of stubborn rectitude. With his Georgia-born wife, Mary Green, he populated this new world with twelve children. He was an indefatigable circuit rider with a flair for the dramatic. On one occasion he was summoned by the organizing committee of a revival to breathe new life into a passionless series of meetings. They did not know if he would come. "The next day the eleven o'clock hour was approaching, the congregation had assembled, and no word from "Rock' Gore. As several men . . . stood outside looking in the direction from which he would arrive, they saw him rounding a curve in the road with his horse at full gallop. He rode up, tossed the bridle reins to someone nearby, took his Bible and went into the Church singing one of the great old revival hymns."
The next generation brought Ezekiel Gore's strong-principled religious assertiveness into the tumultuous post-Civil War politics of northern Mississippi. His numerous children were always politicians, and imbued their politics with the same passionate rhetoric that their grandfather had brought to his religion. The Civil War had impoverished a never particularly prosperous county. Postwar recovery was slow, cash scarce, crops poor. Reconstruction seemed to most Southern whites an abomination, though Choctaw County had relatively few blacks to enfranchise. And with the end of military rule in 1869, the Democratic Party that had dominated the county before the war gradually regained control, though not before the 1874 Reconstructionist Mississippi state legislature divided the county and named the northern part Sumner, after the Massachusetts abolitionist.
Republicans began to disappear from Mississippi. In 1882 the leaders of Sumner County succeeded in having its name changed to the less offensive Webster. Daniel had some of the mitigating afterglow of a belated Founding Father. Reconstruction had been beaten back, and demographics made white power secure; only 25 percent of the county's ten thousand residents were black. The pervasive problem was agricultural depression. People lived spartan lives, close to the proverbial bone. Material sophistication hardly rose above the level of their pioneer grandparents', though Ezekiel's sons were slightly better off than the average. Children of the Book, they were bookish enough to pursue professions as well as farm. To some extent they all became caught up in the tumultuous political events that dominated Webster County in the 1880s.
