By the age of 25, Gore Vidal had written five novels, bought a huge pile on the Hudson River and claimed to have had more than 1000 sexual partners. He had served on a transport ship in the Aleutian Islands off Alaska during World War II and then, in The City And The Pillar, written one of the most important gay novels of the 20th century while living in an old convent in Guatemala. He had been pursued by Anais Nin in New York, met Andre Gide in Paris and E.M. Forster in London, and chased streetboys with Tennessee Williams in Rome. He wasn't hanging around.
This impatience for achievement never left him. As Jay Parini's new biography details, Vidal dreaded losing momentum, fearing the obliterating strokes of what he called the Great Eraser. This entailed a kind of creative promiscuity: he never finished one book before he had started the next, twice ran for political office, had two Broadway hits and wrote scores of screenplays and essays while never missing the chance to appear on television.
It was the small screen that made him big. While many high-minded intellectuals disdained television, Vidal realised its power. On screen, he exuded patrician charm and weary disdain, nonchalantly saying the unsayable and getting under his rivals' skin.
In 1968 he was pitted against the conservative intellectual William F. Buckley in a series of debates as Republicans and Democrats selected their presidential candidates. At one point, Vidal goaded his opponent by calling him a "crypto-Nazi"; Buckley bared his fangs, called Vidal "a queer" and threatened to "sock" him.
Vidal's reputation as a scourge of the establishment was made. In his celebrated essays, many of the best published in the New York Review of Books, he attacked the corruption of politics by corporations, the Cold War excesses in national security spending, homophobia, racism, the war on drugs and almost every aspect of American foreign policy. He relished revisionary history, debunking the reputations of revered presidents. And, at his best, he was nastily funny. The thumping great United States: Essays 1952-92 is his enduring testament.