Aldridge argues that the insistence of certain writers in exploring homosexuality represents an immaturity and lack of values in their work. That's not exactly a good place from which to evaluate Vidal's writing - nor any writing, for that matter, if the critic's obvious homophobia so colors his insight. In fact, Aldridge initially liked Vidal's first two novels, Williwaw and In a Yellow Wood, when he wrote about them contemporary to their publications. A few years later, in After the Lost Generation - and after the appearance of The City and the Pillar, in which Vidal essentially outed himself - Aldridge's opinion of Vidal mysteriously changed.

In a five-page portion of his book, Aldridge suggests that homosexuality may occur in so many novels of his time because it is "one of the last remaining tragic types. His dilemma, like that of the Negro and the Jew, provided a conflict which is easily presentable in fiction and which can be made to symbolize the larger conflicts of modern man." Of course, it never occurred to him that these novelists were simply writing passionately about their own experience from a point of view couldn't understand - or if it did, then the times forbade him to suggest it (or tolerate it). He also says that "the homosexual experience is one of a special kind, it can develop only in one direction, and it can never take the place of the whole range of human experience which the writer must know intimately if he is to be great."

Aldridge's displeasure with Vidal's writing seems to begin with his second novel, In a Yellow Wood, the first with homosexual characters. Naturally, he disliked (and misread) The City and the Pillar, finally stating, "If Vidal showed signs in his previous work of a weakening of his technical and dramatic power, he here shows the far more disturbing signs of a spreading aridity of the soul." He called the novel "purely a social document that was read because it had all the qualities of lurid journalism and not because it showed the craft and insight of an artist."

Aldridge concludes, at last, that "as [Vidal's characters] search for a center of life, so he searches for a center of art." In order for Vidal's work to achieve its goal, he argues, Vidal must discover "a value and a morality for them and for himself."

"Gore Vidal has deserved a better hearing from literary critics than he has received," White asserts, just before discussing Aldridge's reception of Vidal a decade earlier. White, clearly an admirer of Vidal's writing and point of view, discerns a range of Vidalian voices: the "literary prince" of his prolific youth; the tradesman, who wrote for television and magazines to support himself when his novels didn't sell; the voice that expresses a "reasonable respect for homosexuality," and that makes the point that "there should be no point, no pointed finger, and no fascination at all"; and finally, "the voice of involvement to his age," that of a writer "involved in shaping his nation." White concludes: "Were the author and his ideas more deeply valued in the United States, that country would not need so desperately to hear his voices."

Interestingly, despite White's plea for society to accept homosexuality as a matter of course, neither his chapter on Vidal's life, nor his two-page, year-by-year account of the highlights of that life, make mention of Howard Austen, who had been Vidal's companion since the early 1950s. Fifteen years later, in his own Gore Vidal, Robert F. Kiernan would discreetly correct the record.

So the stage is set for a generous and experienced reading of Vidal's work through Burr, a good stopping point. Dick gives his chapters amusing titles, like "A Portrait of the Artist as G.I. Joe," "Huck Honey on the Potomac," "Manchild in the Media," "The Hieroglyphs of Time" and "Myra of the Movies; Or, the Magnificent Androgyne." Unique among studies of Vidal's work, he addresses the juvenilia: poems and short stories published when Vidal was a teen-ager, before he graduated from high school and entered the Army. He even reprints three poems, using this passage of his book to recount some brief biography, but always focusing on the writing rather than the life.

Among his astute and fluid readings of the work, Dick is not above the occasional anecdote. "As a private person," he writes, "Vidal despises the curious. He has been know to seat inquisitorial interviewers in a draft and to accompany journalists seeking definitive proof of his sex life to a bar where he would promptly leave them in their cups and stroll off with a hooker." The tone of Dick's prose often adopts a demi-style similar to the tone of the book he's discussing. Finally, his take on Vidal is just right. "Vidal's allegiance to a literary past that exists, if anywhere, in the English curriculum of the university, has seriously handicapped him," Dick concludes with critical admiration. "His vast reading, which must surpass that of any of his American contemporaries, has made his standards rigidly classical. . .Good writing is hard, gemlike prose that softens and grows full when it becomes confessional."

Camp aside, Mitzel's musings give a breezy reading to Myra through the perspectives of feminism, sexual politics and emerging queer theory. No section of his rapid-fire notes is longer than a page, and most are just a paragraph or two, with the sections separate by asterisks. It ends with a two-page coda, "Myra and Judy: A Terminal Thought," in which Mitzel uses Judy Garland, Dorothy Gale and The Wizard of Oz to allow Judy to teach Myra some lessons, and vice versa.

Next in the book comes "Three Carols for Myra Breckinridge," which are poems penned by John Wieners, followed by Don Meuse's black-and-white drawing of Vidal, and finally, a 40-page interview with Vidal, conducted by Mitzel and Abbott, and originally printed in the magazine Fag Rag. Much of the interview, which took place in Boston in November 1973, concerns sex and sexuality, although of course, politics, history, culture and a little literature make an appearance. During the interview, Vidal even compliments a reading of Myra Breckinridge that appeared in Fag Rag without realizing that Mitzel wrote it.

Two years later, Stanton served as co-editor (with Vidal) of Views from a Window: Conversations with Gore Vidal, an intriguing book that brings together scores of interviews that Vidal gave to a wide range of publications. Stanton blends the comments from various interviews and arranges them by subject matter. The dust jacket of that book promises a forthcoming critical study by Stanton of Vidal's work. However, no such ever book materialized.

Typical of a reactionary conservative, Macaulay rails against Vidal for railing against society. He accuses "Vidal and his partisans" of constructing a sinister syllogism: "These novels are disturbing; literature is disturbing; therefore, these novels are literature." Then, echoing Aldridge 30 years before him, he asserts "that affirmation of rudimentary humanness is also a part of the definition. [Vidal] chooses to affirm venom and vice and what others may call filth - he sees them all as the core of humanity. He consequently creates a world so that he can destroy everyone in it. It all ends in the terminal negation: evil is proclaimed as virtue and worshipped through ultimate debasement."

This, of course, is not what Vidal does as he explores the ways in which people of power behave and the consequences of their behavior on society. But Macaulay, again like Aldridge, is clearly more disturbed by Vidal's politics than his literature, even if he refuses to admit it.

Kiernan's study adds nothing monumentally new to the literature of interpreting Vidal, whom he affectionately calls a "patrician hauteur." His book opens with a critical biography, then goes on to discuss the novels in groups, such as: the early successes (Williwaw and The City and the Pillar), the ancient world, the American trilogy, the Breckinridge novels, the essays, and the minor works (smaller early novels, including Messiah, the Edgar Box mysteries and the short story collection A Thirsty Evil).

Kiernan begins by discussing the several Vidalian manners: patrician ("cool, elegant, and somewhat haughty"); outr�, ("witty, risqu�, obstreperous"); and intellectual ("epigrammatic, iconoclastic, and cheerless"). "These manners and others that are shadings or combinations of them are carried off with aplomb by Vidal both in his life and in his writing," Kiernan writes. "But they are indubitably manners, stylizations of the self that conceal as much of the man as they reveal."

The notion of Vidal's many voices winnows through Kiernan's book, until his summation asserts, "Because Vidal is a writer with many voices, his career seems a history of elaborate feints and passes." He calls Vidal a farceur for whom "insouciance and insolence regularly join forces in his rhetoric." But he's careful to point out that noting Vidal's limitations "does not constitute an attack." He concludes: "The great charm of Vidal's writing is its auctorial audacity. . .The Vidalian persona, con brio, is the ultimate achievement of Vidal's art."

Parini's diverse book reprints chapters from the book-length studies by White, Dick and Kiernan. Italo Calvino pens a salutation, commending Vidal on his knowledge of and affection for Italy. Heather Neilson, an Australian scholar who wrote a doctoral dissertation on Vidal, discusses Messiah, as does the journalist/teacher Alan Cheuse. Stephen Spender reflects on Gore Vidal: Private Eye, Louis Auchincloss on Babylon Revisited (about the novel Hollywood), and Harold Bloom discusses the big historical novel Lincoln.

Together these essays are a mix of pure scholarship and intimate reflection (from friends like Calvino and Auchincloss). "So what's going on here?" Parini asks in his introductory essay. "Is Vidal a rather old-fashioned realist? Is he anti-modern? Why has this postmodern prototype been put on the shelf before he has, indeed, been taken off the shelf?" Parini goes on to suggest reasons for this circumstance: Vidal's unusually high productivity, his diverse canon, his insider approach to his subject matter, and a "mandarin tone [that] relates not only to the sense of the world as a fait accompli" but that "exists in every aspect of the actual content." In short, Parini says, Vidal's way of writing, in most of his fiction and all of his essays, leaves little room for the reader to discern a subtext. "The tone is the essays," he asserts. "It gives them their wonderfully acerbic edge and their vitality." And while his best essays "somehow invite the reader to participate in the 'knowingness' of it all," Parini recognizes that some critics "recoil from this typically Vidalian stance."

The result is something like a survey course in literary analysis applied to the work of one author, with each chapter written for the uninitiated: The authors describe the plot and character development of each book before launching into their analyses, thus you needn't have read the books to follow the discussions. There's a biographical sketch up front, and even a chapter that breezes through the early novels. Their work is comprehensive and obviously admiring, making connections between the books and with their influences rooted in Vidal's reading.

Vidal emerges as a successful, fortunate and maybe even rather ordinary man of letters. He wanted to be a writer, and so he worked diligently at it, winning recognition in every medium he attempted. He did not destroy his life and work with alcohol, ego, greed, anger, bitterness or depression, like so many other writers one could name. He engaged life, but always somehow as an outsider, which allowed him clearer eyes to write about it.

He has, in short, lived a vividly public life of the mind, expressed in a voluminous body of work. As for the inner life, Vidal has always largely kept such feelings to himself, and Kaplan doesn't fell compelled to drag anything of him. From time to time it's evident in the biography - carefully guarded, cautiously revealed, and still somewhat of a mystery.

Kaplan writes elegantly, presenting his metaphors with precision, and summarizing each of his panoply of characters with shrewd analyses. For the most part he treats Vidal's novels and plays as incidents in the life, incorporating their plots and meanings as a part of the ongoing narrative, not bothering at any length to parse the work, which is the realm of other projects.

Focusing, of course, on Vidal's historical novels - mostly the American Chronicles, with references to Julian and Creation - Harris revolves his book around the well-accepted assertion that "the opposition between the individual and society attains a thematic prominence" in American literature that is "dramatized as an antagonism between the private subject and society: it is against the latter that the individual offers resistance, performing self-perserving or self-defining acts of rebellion, whether through escape, confrontation or rejection." He then spends some time discussing this strain of American literature before turning to his authors - Vidal first, then Doctorow. By "working with the 'disagreed- as well as agreed-upon facts," Harris writes, Vidal "signals the desire to engage, critically and interrogatively, with received accounts of the past - to use fictionalized history as a counter-version through which we are prompted to actively re-view history."

Vidal's work, he argues, shows how "the historical fact of power. . .can so readily gather in and around an individual," and by "resurrecting" Aaron Burr as a "revisionist mouthpiece on American history, Vidal not only finds the ideal voice for his own skeptical views on what is said to have happened and therefore on what America so often wants to believe happened, but he also finds a figure who dramatizes, in a thoroughly ironic manner, the fact that the individual can influence history - that (to use his metaphor) the stage is always set for the appearance of the Caesarian character in whom history moves."

Behrendt begins with a brief look at Vidal's public image and critical reception. He then defines some key terms - "camp," "homophobia," "homosexual," "minority" - before offering a biographical sketch of Vidal's life and books. Early in his story, Behrendt state that "Vidal's playing with autobiographic details will become an important aspect when evaluating the sexual identities expressed in his work.," although he agrees with Vidal that is it not necessary to know whether details of an author's work are taken from his life.

The bulk of Behrendt's book then reads the novels and essays to discern "Vidal's Conception of Homosexuality," which "stands in opposition to much of today's writing about homosexuality, which usually rather stresses the positive aspects of Gay identities." Vidal, of course, attaches neither a positive nor a negative to sexual orientation - to him, it merely exists - and he believes that there is no such thing as a homosexual person, but rather merely homosexual acts. Gently troubled by this view, Behrendt notes: "Contrary to Vidal, many Gays find comfort within a Gay identity and a Gay community." He then spends several pages discussing seminal works of homosexual-themed literature, and he concludes about his titular subject: "Vidal's conception of homosexuality does not always hold together, and his novels do not in all points reflect his nonfictional comments on homosexuality. However, at a time when anti-Gay discrimination is on the rise again, Vidal's conviction of the fundamental equality of homosexuals and heterosexuals, the naturalness of all stages of the sexual continuum, is worth being reconsidered."

The author, who teaches politics at La Trobe University in Australia, and who has known Vidal casually for 30 years, has written before on Vidal: A long while back, he wrote an account of Vidal's first visit to Australia. That piece appears in his book "Coming Out in the Seventies" and is summarized in his book "Defying Gravity." Altman's new book doesn't attempt to read Vidal's work in light of literary theory and criticism (psychoanalytic, deconstructive, post-modern, etc.). That would be another enterprise altogether. Instead, it cites popular criticism (i.e., literary essays in general circulation magazines, rather than scholarly journals) but very little scholarly criticism. In fact, the book to which Altman compares his study of Vidal is a book by a journalist: Garry Wills. Altman states his central thesis in terms of Wills' book on John Wayne. But there's an essential difference: Wayne influenced popular culture, and he was an iconic figure; Vidal, on the other hand, seems to contradict society, and thus he's an iconoclastic figure.

Later in his book, Altman breezes over what might have been the zenith of Vidal's life as a public figure: His debate, on national television, against William F. Buckley at the 1968 political conventions. This gets one paragraph of mention in the text when such an encounter might have been the focus of an entire chapter exploring Vidal as public figure. In fact, Altman fails to quote a famous assertions of Vidal's that might cast a light on why he's not an influential public figure: For half a century, Vidal has claimed that "the novel is dead." By this, he means that the novelist is no longer looked upon as a cynosure in American culture. Had Altman explored this assertion, it might have led him to examine Vidal's diminished role as "public figure" and his emergence as, some would say, our National Conscience.

N.B. Altman discussed his book on Australian radio in January 2006. You can listen to the interview if you have Real Player on your computer. And in November 2005, Altman and Vidal appeared together at a Los Angeles book store to discuss the book. At this link, you can hear the interview and read about the event.

"Vidal's idiosyncratic combination of patrician hauteur and radical politics," Frank writes, "proves as hard to assess within the framework of the American political spectrum as his attitudes toward sexuality do in the framework of current literary or cultural analysis." This states the dilemma well, although she does overlook a simple explanation: Vidal is simply wrong about some things - for example, his long-standing assertion that there is no such person as a "homosexual" (the word, Vidal argues, is an adjective describing a behavior, not a noun describing an individual). Her readings of Vidal's work find many illuminating links, although it's quite odd that his 1954 novel Messiah gets only a passing mention when it probably deserves an entire chapter. Begun in 1947 - well before Marshall McLuhan published his most influential work on the role of media in society - Messiah is the first text in which Vidal explores medium-as-message.

The value of Frank's book comes in how, within the context of her central thesis, she unites the many tentacles of Vidal's body of work: his American Chronicles, his "inventions," his nonfiction, his interest in ancient history, and of course, his appearances on television and in the movies. "The historical novels thus provide the theory of his intellectual career," she writes, "while the experimental novels provide the practice." She then traces this notion through the writing and the life. Frank explores the movement away from writers and toward university scholars as the honored intellectuals in our culture. Vidal, she argues, "by supplementing the role of writer with television," has managed to be both - and without shame or apology. And he did so early in his career, when he recognized that the writer's role as public intellectual was on the decline because of the media's rising influence. Since then, in his fiction and nonfiction, he has explored "the shift from print to screen modes of publicity," and he has articulated a new harmony between "the pole of paranoia and romance," which Frank identifies as the two attitudes of traditional media analysis.

"Vidal's public appeal," Frank writes, after a discussion of the American Chronicles as "romance" novels, "rests on his ability to telecast and write out of a position that does not cordon off serious literature from a mass audience: rather, it brings Henry James and Jacqueline Susann together. If Vidal maintains the status of exemplary American writer-intellectual in the age of TV, it is because he has both exploited the print-screen circuit in the genre of romance and found ways to transmit his sexual politics on-screen."

Frank clearly recognizes that Vidal's two passions in life are politics and human sexuality, the former because he grew up surrounded by it, and the latter because he's a sexual outlaw himself. But he did not, as Frank suggests, abandon the writing of "literary" novels merely because he believed they were in decline. He abandoned them because, as he came to better understand his own point of view, he naturally sought more rewarding forms and mediums to express himself. Vidal once said that he didn't expect readers in 1948 to associate the homosexuality of his protagonist in The City and the Pillar with the author himself. When they did, it forced him to re-evaluate the course of his life.

Vidal has certainly used the broadcast media to gain attention for his political and cultural ideas, but he never actually used it to sell his books. His novels Julian, Washington, D.C., Myra Breckinridge and Burr became best-sellers on their own. His TV appearances in the 1960s through the 1980s largely followed the success of those books, and many of his books along the way failed to attract readers despite his notoriety. So it's something of an overstatement - or at least, another matter altogether - when Frank asserts: "Vidal has exploited electronic forms of publicity both to stay famous and to address the divergence of the categories of literary author and intellectual." All in all, Frank relies a bit too heavily on what Vidal says about himself as she analyzes his literary and public lives. She clearly seeks to reconstruct - rather than deconstruct - her subject.

Toward the end of her book, Frank neatly sums up and brings together its threads. "Vidal's classicism consists of a universalizing understanding of both sexuality and publicity accompanied by a strong sense of history that registers changes in the status that has been accorded to each," she says. "Against all expectations framed by the contemporary udnerstanding of TV, Vidal is able to yoke classicism to TV, the vehicle through which his politics (and sexual politics) frequently have been expressed." In other words, Vidal is an orator, like an ancient Roman, and he uses both print and moving pictures (film and TV) to orate on sex and politics, the two subjects that most interest him (as they did his classical ancestors).

If Vidal has appeared so much on television, it's probably because, as his aphorism implies, television is simply another form of instant pleasure (and no doubt a stroke to his voluble ego). One doubts that his sex life, the corollary to his broadcast life, did much to foster his career. Quite the opposite, in fact, as Frank reminds us: The City and the Pillar, so scandalous in its time, forced him to begin writing pulp novels under pseudonyms and scripts for live television. And it's certainly not true that "the pleasures of sex and appearing on TV are interchangeable," as Frank writes. Vidal never said that, and one hope that he's had far more of the former than the latter.

In her critical study - published in Portuguese, and so far not translated into English - Martins compares the historical novels of the two authors. The web site of the book's publisher, Peter Lang, says that the book explores different models of post-modern historical fiction, particularly the historical fiction of Saramago and Vidal, looking at how the works reconstruct the historical memory of their respective nations. The book is one of only two critical studies of Vidal's work published in a language other than English. The title means "the construction of the history of the nation in Jos� Saramago and Gore Vidal."

"The postmodern experience reflects a moment of crisis in the modernity project that is translated into a crisis in the representation of the empirical world," Martins writes of her work. "In historical terms, this crisis results in a process of revision and reassessment of the interpretation of the historical phenomenon. In literary terms, [it] translates into the search for new aesthetic codes [that] informs the two main currents of postmodern literary production: experimental fiction and historical fiction." Her book seeks to show "how Vidal's and Saramago's novels reveal the structure of the 'building' of the American and Portuguese national memories," and "and how these processes promote the rereading and rewriting of the past." She also explores the extent to which the novels hold any hope for "intervention and historical transformation."

Martins has also published a few essays on Vidal's work in various journals and anthologies in both English and Portuguese: "Quotation and Memory in Gore Vidal's Burr and Jos� Saramago's The History of the Siege of Lisbon," in the book In Dialogue with Jos� Saramago: Essays in Comparative Literature (co-edited with Mark Sabine), as part of the Manchester Spanish & Portuguese Series, No. 18 (2006), pages 163-175; "O Cinema Americano e a Mentira da Guerra em Hollywood de Gore Vidal," in the journal M�thesis, issue No. 15 (2006), pages 1-9; and "O Verso e o Reverso da Medalha em Lincoln de Gore Vidal," in the journal M�thesis, issue No. 14 (2005), pages 255-268.

S.T. Joshi - the author or editor of numerous books, including Atheism: A Reader, which includes an essay by Vidal on American fundamentalism - has updated the canon of research on Vidal with this new and extensive bibliography. The book includes a foreword by Jay Parini, Vidal's literary executor and himself the editor of a collection of scholarly essays on Vidal.

Naturally, Joshi begins by listing all of Vidal's books in English (U.S. and U.K.) along with a publication history that documents every edition. For fiction, he briefly summarizes the plot; for essay collections, he lists the contents of each book. Other sections in the bibliography round up: articles and reviews by Vidal, briefly describing the content; archival material at Harvard (the major repository) and other locations; Vidal in the media; news items and encyclopedia listings about Vidal and his family; interviews with Vidal; books and essays about Vidal; and in a highly informative final section, major-media criticism and reviews of Vidal's books, with concise summaries that excerpt many of the reviews listed for each book. There are even brief sections listing web sites and academic papers. A long introduction by the author walks the reader through Vidal's personal and literary biography.

Joshi's section on foreign editions in his weakest. Although once again greatly detailed - and certainly helpful to collectors - it overlooks numerous editions, both older ones and more recent ones issued well before Joshi's 2006 cutoff date. The section even fails to list three languages - Korean, Slovak and Arabic - into which Vidal has been translated. Joshi lists the Finnish edition Naiset kirjastossa ja muita kertomuksia as a "translation of an unspecified work by Vidal." All it would have taken to solve this mystery is a Finnish speaker to translate the title, which means "The Ladies in the Library and Other Stories." This 1986 book is, in fact, three stories selected from A Thirsty Evil, Vidal's 1956 collection of seven stories. The Finnish trilogy of stories was also published in an English-language edition, which Joshi lists elsewhere, incorrectly, as a reissue of the full seven-story 1956 collection.

No doubt a book this ambitious, involving so much research and minutiae, was bound to have omissions and errors. It remains a valuable and very interesting book, especially for its notations on the copious writing about Vidal over the past half century.

Volume one of the bibliography is a book illustrated with more than 500 black and white images of Vidal's book covers and title pages. Volume two is a CD-ROM that presents color images of the covers of many of Vidal's books. Inside the printed edition, Abbott does more than just list Vidal's books, plays, screenplays, magazine articles, interviews, juvenilia, contributions to other books and more. He describes many of these publications in copious detail.

This is not a book that one sits down to read cover to cover. It's a reference guide that will last for generations as an encyclopedia of Vidal's writing and the forms in which it was delivered to the public. Each entry in the A section, for example, which details English-language editions, describes each book in near microscopic detail. Throughout the years Vidal has revised and republished some of his books, and Abbott has read the original and revised texts page by page, creating easy-to-follow charts that document the changes word by word.

The section on foreign editions has more than 400 individual entries, including citations for Vidal's writing that has been translated into Braille. For the convenience of the reader, Abbott lists foreign editions in two ways: language by language, for people researching all of Vidal's books in a particular language; and title by title, for people researching all of the translations of a particular book.

Abbott also includes a lengthy chronology of Vidal's life and work, and a voluminous section on Vidal's writing in periodicals, his writing for television and the movies, and writing about him in magazines and books. It's a definitive work for literary scholars and Vidalophiles.

Neilson's book, her first on Vidal, will draw upon her dissertation and her more recent thinking about his work as she looks at Vidal's representations of leaders and historical figures (political, military and religious), and how Vidal uses such people to explore the nature of power structures. And because Vidal writes about the influence of media in politics, so will her book.

Here's how the publisher describes it: "The late Gore Vidal occupied a unique position within American letters. Born into a political family, he ran for office several times, but was consistently critical of his nation's political system and its leaders. A prolific writer in several genres, Vidal was also widely known - particularly in the US - on the basis of his frequent appearances in the various electronic media. This ground-breaking work examines the centrality of the theme of power throughout his writings. Political Animal: Gore Vidal on Power focuses primarily, although not exclusively, on Vidal's historical fiction. In his novels depicting American history, and those set in the ancient world, Vidal evokes a world in which deliberately propagated falsehood ('disinformation') can become established as truth. The book engages with Vidal's representations of political and religious leaders, and with his deeply ambivalent fascination with the increasingly inescapable influence of the media. It asserts that Vidal's oeuvre has a Shakespearean resonance in its persistent obsession with the question of what constitutes legitimate power and authority."

"Alcohol, massive amounts of it consumed over decades, did him incalculable damage, raving his physical and psychological equilibrium," Mewshaw writes. "This, it might be argued, was his private business. But because drinking undermined his work and his public persona, I believe that this topic and his long-standing depression deserve discussion."

Whether it undermined his work - at least for most his life - is certainly not settled personal history. But Vidal's alcoholism and depression have rarely been approached, and learning about it here gives new dimension to a man seen by so many as being haughty and aloof. Mewshaw says his book is not (borrowing Joyce Carol Oates' term) a "pathography," which he describes as "a lurid post-mortem that dwells on an author's deterioration." It's a more personal tale that takes a balanced and humane look at his gifted friend.

The Early Fiction: 1946-1956 The Pseudonyms: 1950-1954 The Later Fiction: 1962-2006

The American Chronicles: 1967-2000 Works for the Theater: 1956-1972 Essays, Interviews and Memoirs: 1963-Present Writing About Gore Vidal: 1951-Present

Return to the Gore Vidal Thumbnails introduction

If you came right to this thumbnail page and don't see a frame on the left, please visit The Gore Vidal Index now or after you've enjoyed the thumbnails, which you can access from the main index page. And please send me comments if you have a thought, a suggestion or a link to add to the index.

�Copyright 2007 by
Harry Kloman
University of Pittsburgh
kloman@pitt.edu