Gore Vidal

Novelist, essayist and playwright

Gore Vidal is a novelist, essayist and playwright whose career spans six decades. Outspoken critic of the American Establishment, he has been a unique presence on the stage of politics, history and culture, many of whose key figures he has known. He first came to attention with his 1948 novel The City and the Pillar which outraged mainstream critics as the first major American novel to feature unambiguous homosexuality.

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 over a hundred essays, gathered in several volumes published between 1962 and 2001.