Gore Vidal – författare

A literary cause célèbre when first published in 1948, Gore Vidal's now-classic The City and the Pillar stands as a landmark novel of the gay experienceJim Willard, former high-school athlete and clean-cut boy-next-door, is haunted by the memory of a romantic adolescent encounter with his friend Bob Ford. As Jim pursues his first love, in awe of the very same masculinity he possesses himself, his progress through the secret gay world of 1940's America unveils surreptitious Hollywood affairs, the hidden life of the military in the Second World War and the underworld bar culture of New York City.With the publication of his daring third novel The City and the Pillar in 1948, Gore Vidal shocked the American public, which has just begun to hail him as their newest and brightest young writer. It remains not only an authentic and profoundly important social document but also a serious exploration of the nature of idealistic love.'Gore Vidal, a writer of lustrous and fabulously readable prose, was always ahead of his time, so it is wonderful to see some of his finest works being republished for an audience who will be ready to (re)discover his daring, his insight and his wickedly waspish wit' STEPHEN FRY

Gore Vidal’s uniquely irreverent take on America’s founding fathers will enliven all future discussion of the enduring power of their nation-building ideas  “Trust Gore Vidal to teach us things we never learned in school. In Inventing a Nation, his quick wit flickers over the canonical tale of our republic’s founding, turning it into a dark and deliciously nuanced comedy of men, manners, and ideas.”—Amanda Heller, Boston Globe (Sunday)  “Entertaining and enlightening. . . . A must for buffs of American civilization and its discontents.”—Booklist  Gore Vidal, one of the master stylists of American literature and one of the most acute observers of American life and history, turns his immense literary and historiographic talent to a portrait of the formidable trio of George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. In Inventing a Nation, Vidal transports the reader into the minds, the living rooms (and bedrooms), the convention halls, and the salons of Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and others. We come to know these men, through Vidal’s splendid and percipient prose, in ways we have not up to now—their opinions of each other, their worries about money, their concerns about creating a viable democracy. Vidal brings them to life at the key moments of decision in the birthing of our nation. He also illuminates the force and weight of the documents they wrote, the speeches they delivered, and the institutions of government by which we still live. More than two centuries later, America is still largely governed by the ideas championed by this triumvirate.

In a witty and elegant autobiography that takes up where his bestelling Palimpsest left off, the celebrated novelist, essayist, critic, and controversialist Gore Vidal reflects on his remarkable life.Writing from his desks in Ravello and the Hollywood Hills, Vidal travels in memory through the arenas of literature, television, film, theatre, politics, and international society where he has cut a wide swath, recounting achievements and defeats, friends and enemies made (and sometimes lost). From encounters with, amongst others, Jack and Jacqueline Kennedy, Tennessee Williams, Eleanor Roosevelt, Orson Welles, Johnny Carson, Francis Ford Coppola to the mournful passing of his longtime partner, Howard Auster, Vidal always steers his narrative with grace and flair. Entertaining, provocative, and often moving, Point to Point Navigation wonderfully captures the life of one of twentieth-century America’s most important writers.From the Trade Paperback edition.

In Death Likes it Hot, dashing P.R. man Peter Sargeant travels out to a posh beach community to help a wealthy socialite plan an end-of-summer party. His enjoyment of the sun, the surf, and the company of a lovely young fashion reporter is interrupted by the death of the socialite''s niece: she mysteriously drowns while swimming on a crowded beach. No one suspects murder until the police find a lethal dose of sleeping pills in her system. As Sargeant watches the police''s investigation unfold, he keeps an eye on the grieving socialite; the victim''s famous painter husband; a suspiciously cheery brother and sister; and a garrulous tabloid columnist. Now, instead of planning guest lists, wine choices, and menus, Sargeant is faced with a killer unlike he''s ever faced: highly sophisticated, devilishly clever, and just as smooth as he is.

From the Trade Paperback edition.

In Death in the Fifth Position, dashing P.R. man Peter Sargent is hired by a ballet company on the eve of a major upcoming performance.   Handling the press seems to be no problem, but when a rising star in the company is killed during the performance—dropped from thirty feet above the stage, crashing to her death in a perfect fifth position—Sargent has a real case on his hands.  As he ingratiates himself with the players behind the scenes (especially one lovely young ballerina), he finds that this seemingly graceful ballet company is performing their most dramatic acts behind the curtain.  There are sharp rivalries, sordid affairs, and shady characters.  Sargent, though, has no trouble staying on point and proving that the ballerina killer is no match for his keen eye and raffish charm.From the Trade Paperback edition.

In Death Before Bedtime, dashing P.R. man Peter Sargent is invited to the home of a venerable senator to help strategize his imminent run for president.  On the night before he’s to announce, though, the senator is murdered in his bed.  No longer needed as a political publicist, Sargent finds himself helping the police find the killer.  He deftly navigates an eccentric cast of characters, all of whom are suspects: the rebellious daughter; the sycophantic aide; the grieving widow; and the power-hungry governor with his eye on the senator’s job.  Somehow, between charming the senator’s daughter and glad-handing Washington’s elite, Sargent still manages to methodically put the pieces into place and sees that politics truly is a cut-throat business.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Hollywood marks the fifth episode in Gore Vidal''s "Narratives of Empire," his celebrated series of six historical novels that form his extended biography of the United States.        It is 1917, and President Woodrow Wilson is about to lead the country into the Great War in Europe. In California, a new industry is born that will irreversibly transform America. Caroline Sanford, the alluring heroine of Empire, discovers the power of moving pictures to manipulate reality as she vaults to screen stardom under the name of Emma Traxler. Just as Caroline must balance her two lives--West Coast movie star and East Coast newspaper publisher and senator''s mistress--so too must America balance its two power centers: Hollywood and Washington.                         Here is history as only Gore Vidal can re-create it: brimming with intrigue and scandal, peopled by the greats of the silver screen and American politics.        "Hollywood shimmers with the illusion of politics and the politics of illusion," wrote the Chicago Sun-Times. "A wonderfully literate and consistently impressive work of fiction that clearly belongs on a shelf with Vidal''s best," said The New York Times Book Review.        With a new Introduction by the author.From the Hardcover edition.

Lincoln is the cornerstone of Gore Vidal''s fictional American chronicle, which includes Burr, 1876, Washington, D.C., Empire, and Hollywood. It opens early on a frozen winter morning in 1861, when President-elect Abraham Lincoln slips into Washington, flanked by two bodyguards. The future president is in disguise, for there is talk of a plot to murder him. During the next four years there will be numerous plots to murder this man who has sworn to unite a disintegrating nation. Isolated in a ramshackle White House in the center of a proslavery city, Lincoln presides over a fragmenting government as Lee''s armies beat at the gates. In this profoundly moving novel, a work of epic proportions and intense human sympathy, Lincoln is observed by his loved ones and his rivals. The cast of characters is almost Dickensian: politicians, generals, White House aides, newspapermen, Northern and Southern conspirators, amiably evil bankers, and a wife slowly going mad. Vidal''s portrait of the president is at once intimate and monumental, stark and complex, drawn with the wit, grace, and authority of one of the great historical novelists.   With a new Introduction by the author.From the Hardcover edition.

Empire, the fourth novel in Gore Vidal''s monumental six-volume chronicle of the American past, is his prodigiously detailed portrait of the United States at the dawn of the twentieth century as it begins to emerge as a world power.------While America struggles to define its destiny, beautiful and ambitious Caroline Sanford fights to control her own fate. One of Vidal''s most in-spired creations, she is an embodiment of the complex, vigorous young nation. From the back offices of her Washington newspaper, Caroline confronts the two men who threaten to thwart her ambition: William Randolph Hearst and his protégé, Blaise Sanford, Caroline''s half brother. In their struggles for power the lives of brother and sister become intertwined with those of Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt, as well as Astors, Vanderbilts, and Whitneys--all incarnations of America''s Gilded Age.------"Mr. Vidal demonstrates a political imagination and insider''s sagacity equaled by no other practicing fiction writer," said The New York Times Book Review. "Like the earlier novels in his historical cycle, Empire is a wonderfully vivid documentary drama."------With a new Introduction by the author.From the Hardcover edition.

For readers who can’t get enough of the hit Broadway musical Hamilton,Gore Vidal’s stunning novel about Aaron Burr, the man who killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel—and who served as a successful, if often feared, statesman of our fledgling nation.    Here is an extraordinary portrait of one of the most complicated—and misunderstood—figures among the Founding Fathers. In 1804, while serving as vice president, Aaron Burr fought a duel with his political nemesis, Alexander Hamilton, and killed him. In 1807, he was arrested, tried, and acquitted of treason. In 1833, Burr is newly married, an aging statesman considered a monster by many. But he is determined to tell his own story, and he chooses to confide in a young New York City journalist named Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler. Together, they explore both Burr''s past—and the continuing civic drama of their young nation.   Burr is the first novel in Gore Vidal''s Narratives of Empire series, which spans the history of the United States from the Revolution to post-World War II. With their broad canvas and sprawling cast of fictional and historical characters, these novels present a panorama of American politics and imperialism, as interpreted by one of our most incisive and ironic observers.

The Golden Age is the concluding volume in Gore Vidal''s celebrated and bestselling Narratives of Empire series-a unique pageant of the national experience from the United States'' entry into World War Two to the end of the Korean War.The historical novel is once again in vogue, and Gore Vidal stands as its undisputed American master. In his six previous narratives of the American empire-Burr, Lincoln, 1876, Empire, Hollywood, and Washington, D.C.-he has created a fictional portrait of our nation from its founding that is unmatched in our literature for its scope, intimacy, political intelligence, and eloquence. Each has been a major bestseller, and some have stirred controversy for their decidedly ironic and unillusioned view of the realities of American power and of the men and women who have exercised that power.The Golden Age is Vidal''s crowning achievement, a vibrant tapestry of American political and cultural life from 1939 to 1954, when the epochal events of World War Two and the Cold War transformed America, once and for all, for good or ill, from a republic into an empire. The sharp-eyed and sympathetic witnesses to these events are Caroline Sanford, Washington, D.C., newspaper publisher turned Hollywood pioneer producer-star, and Peter Sanford, her nephew and publisher of the independent intellectual journal The American Idea. They experience at first hand the masterful maneuvers of Franklin Roosevelt to bring a reluctant nation into World War Two, and later, the actions of Harry Truman that commit the nation to a decades-long twilight struggle against Communism-developments they regard with a marked skepticism, even though they end in an American global empire. The locus of these events is Washington, D.C., yet the Hollywood film industry and the cultural centers of New York also play significant parts. In addition to presidents, the actual characters who appear so vividly in the pages of The Golden Age include Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Hopkins, Wendell Willkie, William Randolph Hearst, Dean Acheson, Tennessee Williams, Joseph Alsop, Dawn Powell-and Gore Vidal himself.The Golden Age offers up United States history as only Gore Vidal can, with unrivaled penetration, wit, and high drama, allied to a classical view of human fate. It is a supreme entertainment that will also change readers'' understanding of American history and power.

When two women tragically perish in a Duluth snowdrift, the one called Edna is reborn in 'Duluth', the popular television series and the one called Beryl finds herself in a 'Hyatt Regency' romantic novel entitled ROGUE DUKE. In Duluth they do it all with word processors. Meanwhile Lieutenant Darlene Ecks, strip-search enthusiast, terrorizes a barrio full of illegal Mexican immigrants until they rise up in defiance, the mayor plumbs the mysteries of a bright red spaceship and a life and death contest is waged between Duluth's leading socialite and its foremost author to complete contradictory biographies of Betty Grable.Gore Vidal's wicked extravaganza sports special effects not expected in a novel; and it poses taunting puzzles like who is the guy they call The Dude? And why is it said, 'Every society gets the Duluth it deserves'?

Investigative journalist and aviatrix Teddy, who narrates Gore Vidal's metaphysical thriller, has moulded herself on flying ace Amelia Earhart. Although she's aware that's a bit anachronistic, it qualifies her to pilot Kalki, Vietnam vet and incarnate of Vishnu, round Kathmandu in a story that soars from New Orleans to Washington, Paris to New Delhi - ever above and outside of this world ...

It is a risky (and risque) business becoming 'Woman Triumphant' - exercising total power over men like Rusty Godowski. Rusty just wants to be a Hollywood star like everyone else at Buck Loner's academy, but now that Buck's niece, Myra Breckinridge, has arrived, the curriculum is taking a wildly strange turn. Willing to risk all to be superb and unique, Myra means to prove to her old friend Dr Montag that it is possible to work out in life all one's fantasies - and survive.'From Myra's fist appearnce on the page she was a megastar', explains her creator, Gore Vidal. Myra caused a second furore when she returned in Myron to battle it out with her eponymous alter ego, a drab little man fallen into marriage and a job in Chinese catering. Theirs is a contest of hormonal roulette, with glorious Myra off on time-travelling missions of mercy back to 1948 to try to change cinema history and to introduce her own radical theories of popuation control. Meanwhile Myron tries desperately to stay in the present as inconspicuously as Mrya will allow.

Gore Vidal's fictional recreation of the Roman Empire teetering on the crux of Christianity and ruled by an emperor who was an inveterate dabbler in arcane hocus-pocus, a prig, a bigot, and a dazzling and brilliant leader.

Vidal's historical novel set in the 5th century BC and narrated by Cyrus Spitama, son of a Persian prince and Greek sorceress, grandson of the prophet Zoroaster, and ambassador to the courts of India, China and Greece. Pericles, Thucydides, Sophocles and Confucius are among the book's characters.

A collection of essays taken from 40 years of work by the bestselling and celebrated Gore VidalGore Vidal's reputation as America's finest essayist is an enduring one. This collection, chosen by the author from 40 years of work, contains about two-thirds of what he published in various magazines and journals. He has divided the essays into three categories, or states. State of the art covers literature, including novelists and critics, bestsellers, pieces on Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Suetonius, Nabokov and Montaigne (a previously uncollected essay from 1992). State of the union deals with politics and public life: sex, drugs, money, Abraham Lincoln, Eleanor Roosevelt, The Holy Family (his essay on the Kennedys), Nixon, and finally Monotheism and its Discontents , a scathing critique of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. In state of being, we are given personal responses to people and events: recollections of his childhood, E. Nesbit, Tarzan, Tennessee Williams and Anais Nin.'Magnificent... irresistible from beginning to end' The Times'All the Vidals are on display in this glittering showcase' Guardian'Vidal is the outstanding literary radical of America' Melvyn Bragg

Continuing what has been dubbed his 'revenge on two hundred years of American history', Gore Vidal locates this novel in Washington. But this is 1917, and Hollywood is now competing with America's capital as the nation's power-base, just as it fights for centre-stage in this book. Caroline Sanford, erstwhile newspaper magnate, launches herself into the West Coast land of celluloid dreams and becomes, overnight, an international star. Not for nothing, on the dawn of World War One, is Caroline making films like the Huns from Hell. She is a government agent. But in Washington, that government isn't doing awfully well. Weighed down by his League of Nation's failure, by Roosevelt, Clemenceau, a stroke and the ship-like tonnage of his wife Edith, President Woodrow Wilson is on the wane - and Warren Harding is on the up. A popular, handsome, toothpick-chomping philanderer and dimwit whose wife is given to consulting spiritualists, he is about to usher in a new era. One of unprecedented scandal, cinematic extravagance and tawdry disintegration. The sort of era where the President could easily be mistaken for a film star ...

History is gossip,' says a protagonist in Washington, D.C., 'but the trick is determining which gossip is history.' It is a trick that Gore Vidal has mastered in his ongoing chronicle of that circus of opportunism and hypocrisy called American politics and which he plays with renewed vigour in this expose of the nation's capital.Young Clay Overbury, Senator Burden Day's assistant, has both a modest background and immense ambitions. Extremely handsome, oozing charm and seemingly dedicated to the Senator's cause, he is also duplicitous, conniving, and disloyal. But Enid Canford doesn't think so: she marries him, so providing the Sanford newspaper dynasty with a direct line to the Senator. Her father Blaise, at first loathing his son-in-law, later learns to love him - for all the wrong reasons. So begins this tale of lust and ambition set in the Republic's high noon. From the late 1930s to Jo McCarthy's reign of terror, Gore Vidal charts the seamy, sleazy side of Washington. Mixing sober history with nakedly Gothic melodrama, he provides an intoxicating cocktail of blackmail, betrayal, sexual ambivalence, lunacy and conspiracy - or, in a word, politics.

Here is the story of arguably America's finest hour; of the time when the twentieth century dawned, Queen Victoria died, and America, basking deliciously in excess wealth, rather thought it might snap up an empire of its own. Yet while politicians muse over the potential of China or the Philippines - even Russia - empires are being built at home; railway empires; industrial empires; newspaper empires. Into this arena float the delectable Caroline Sanford, putative heiress and definite catch. Caroline is an oddity; she has been raised in France where they teach rich girls to talk and think. American society women, required only to think of themselves as the most interesting beings on earth, are rather alarmed. American men are amused - until Caroline shirks from marriage, sues her brother, buys a newspaper, and becomes that even greater oddity - a powerful woman. Mingling with the movers and shakers of the day - with President McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William Randolf Hearst, Henry James, the Astors, Vanderbilts and Whitneys - Caroline Sanford echoes the glorious passage of the United States as it sweeps into a new century, reaching boldly for the world.

With the centennial year of the United States as the target of this historical novel, Gore Vidal again mounts a glorious expedition into that grimy and intricate activity called politics. And this is politics as it ought to be: gossip, corruption, money, dinner parties, more corruption, and all the tacky panoply of power. Into the rarefied atmosphere of a world where money has begun to talk very loudly ? usually through the mouths of people called Astor ? step Charles Schuyler and his daughter Emma. Charlie is the unacknowledged bastard son of Aaron Burr; Emma is rather beautiful; and both think it is prudent to return from penury in Europe and secure a fortuitous marriage for Emma. But America is no longer a young republic; it's a fledgling international superpower with its attendant seedy administration, dubious election campaigns, snobbery, 'popped corn', 'speaking tubes' and 'perpendicular railways' (lifts). It's a world that will welcome into its social and political bosom these two attractive exotics with the right names. And it's a world whose every political peccadillo, social slip-up and irresistible intrigue is recorded in this, the journal of Charlie Schuyler.

In the hazardous fictional terrain of his historical novels, Gore Vidal is never especially kind to American history in general, or to its icons in particular. Yet in this brilliantly realised study of Abraham Lincoln, he paints a surprising and near-heroic picture of the man who led America through four of the most divisive and dangerous years of the nation's history. Observed alternately by his loved ones, his rivals and his future assassins, Lincoln at first appears as an inept and naïve backwoods lawyer. People in this novel are not averse to turning up, getting drunk, and regaling the reader with details of Lincoln's whoring activities and his seemingly inexhaustible supply of folksy stories. Yet gradually Lincoln the towering leader of deep vision emerges in a Washington engulfed by fear, greed and the horrors of the Civil War. Lincoln's loving but mentally decomposing wife, his view from the White House on slavery and America's bloodiest war, and his own, fierce personal ambition: all are portrayed with a vibrancy and an urgency that almost belies what they have now become ? history itself.