Gore Vidal summary

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Gore Vidal, orig. Eugene Luther Vidal, (born Oct. 3, 1925, West Point, N.Y., U.S.—died July 31, 2012, Los Angeles, Calif.), U.S. novelist, playwright, and essayist. Vidal began publishing his writings soon after his wartime army service. Though he wrote stage plays and television and film screenplays, he is best known for his irreverent and intellectually adroit novels. The City and the Pillar (1948) became notorious for its homoerotic subject matter. Myra Breckinridge (1968) was acclaimed for its wild satire. His other novels, many of them historical and most of them best sellers, include Julian (1964), Washington, D.C. (1967), Burr (1974), 1876 (1976), and Lincoln (1984). He also published several essay collections and the memoirs Palimpsest (1996) and Point to Point Navigation (2006). Known for his iconoclastically leftist political analyses, he twice ran unsuccessfully for congressional office.

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