Gore Vidal and JFK
For decades, Gore Vidal was one of the most celebrated media personalities. Even more than his writing ability, Vidal was famous as a television guest and media figure. If you needed a witty, acerbic quote, you went to Gore Vidal. Well, that is no longer the case. After spending most of his later years at his home in Ravello, Italy, the writer Gore Vidal is dead at age 86.
Born in West Point and the son of a military flying instructor who founded three airlines, Eugene Luther Gore Vidal Jr. shortened his name to Gore Vidal and became a writer while serving in the US Army. He claimed to have slept with dozens of men and women before age 25, and was involved in a relationship with an ad executive named Howard Austen for 53 years (as well as Anais Nin). As it turns out, his pers0nal life was as interesting as his professional one.
The one thing you could say about Vidal is the man was a prolific writer. In addition to his many appearances in the media, his occasional acting, and his two runs for Congress in 1960 and 1982, Vidal penned 25 novels, several volumes of essays, two memoirs, and a great deal of screenplays, teleplays, play adaptations for television, and any number of things. He also write mysteries under a pseudonym. If you could write it, Gore Vidal would.
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