"A Narcissist is Someone Better Looking Than You Are" Born On This Day- October 3rd... Gore Vidal

"There is not one human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise."


In my collection of favorite authors there looms the Holy Trinity: Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote & Gore Vidal. If I was pressed to pick just one, I would pick the works of Gore Vidal. Brilliant, erudite, perceptive & sarcastic, Vidal could be my one writer library. He is the author of 23 novels, 5 plays, 2 memoirs, numerous screenplays & short stories, & well over 200 essays. With his pedigree (his grandfather was a US senator & his father was a member of Roosevelt’s Cabinet), some good luck & talent, Vidal was witness to almost a century of American political & social life. His most famous series of novels: Burr, Lincoln, 1876, Empire, Hollywood, Washington DC & The Golden Age, are a fictional history of the United States from the American Revolution to the recent past. Vidal ran for Congress in 1960 & the U.S. Senate in 1982, & he lost both elections. Vidal turned his political genius into literature, chronicling the decline & fall of the American empire in a series of perceptive essays- United States: Essays 1952-1992, which won the 1993 National Book Award. Last year, Vidal's best essays were collected in The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal.

Vidal’s latest, Point to Point Navigation, is a memoir that finds the author coming to grips with the loss of his Partner of over fifty years, Howard Auster, who died in 2003. As always, Vidal’s personal drama unfolds against the backdrop of a larger political & historical tableau, in this case the spectacle of George W. Bush’s America as it sinks deeper into war, debt, & autocratic rule. The book’s title refers to Vidal’s flight service during World War, a method of visual navigation in which one flies from one landmark to the next. A follow-up to his 1995 memoir, Palimpsest, the new book returns to Vidal’s early years but focuses mostly on the second half of his life.

Gore Vidal is a treasury of quips &bon mots.& his vast knowledge of literature & history, particularly American, shows him to be a sarp observer. His razor sharp tongue cuts down the powerful. He does it with aplomb, saying, “Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, & not giving a damn.”


“You can get sex anywhere. You cannot get a friend anywhere. I thought that would be clear to everyone."