Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal has his work cut out for him. In order for historical fiction like his to work as literary art, it is necessary that it not be required to do all of history's work for it. History must be knowledge already held in common if the central, poignant effect of historical fiction is to work properly; that effect, namely, by which the reader knows in advance what the characters of the novel only uncover step by step.

Christopher Hitchens, the engaging and enraging British-American author and essayist whose polemical writings on religion, politics, war and other provocations established him as one of his generation's most robust public intellectuals, has died. He was 62. Hitchens died Thursday night at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, said his literary agent, Steve Wasserman. Hitchens was diagnosed with advanced esophageal cancer in June 2010, when his memoir, "Hitch-22," hit the bestseller lists.

Prolific author and playwright Gore Vidal has listed his Sunset Strip-area home for $3,495,000. The 1929 Mediterranean villa of 4,782 square feet has a living room with a walk-in fireplace, a meditation room, a music room and an office. The main house has two en suite bedrooms and two staff or guest rooms. Including a separate guesthouse, the property has a total of five bedrooms and five bathrooms. The nearly half-acre of landscaped grounds contain a swimming pool, multiple patios and a koi fountain.

Prolific author and playwright Gore Vidal has listed his Sunset Strip-area home for $3,495,000. The 1929 Mediterranean villa of 4,782 square feet has a living room with a walk-in fireplace, a meditation room, a music room and an office. The main house has two en suite bedrooms and two staff or guest rooms. Including a separate guesthouse, the property has a total of five bedrooms and five bathrooms. The nearly half-acre of landscaped grounds contain a swimming pool, multiple patios and a koi fountain.

Novelist Gore Vidal, who may have written the first American novel treating homosexuality as normal ("The City and the Pillar") unleashes his razor tongue on same-sex marriage in an interview in the April issue of Hollywood-based Genre magazine. "Of all the nonissues on Earth," he says, "this is the greatest." Vidal argues that one of the best features of "same sexuality" is that the heterosexual family structure is not a social expectation.

The summer of 1948, Gore Vidal found himself keeping track of Truman Capote's lies. "I don't know why," he later remarked. "As I was the only one who found them offensive, why should I have cared?"

Gore Vidal, one of America's leading social commentators, is the ultimate hyphenate: novelist-essayist-playwright-screenwriter-politician-actor. Seven of his novels, including "Burr" and "1876," hit the top of the bestseller list. His "United States: Essays 1952-1992" won last year's National Book Award for nonfiction, while his adaptation of his play "The Best Man" walked off with the Critics' Prize at Cannes.

Gore Vidal and History are on breezy first-name terms, but there is a trickle of irritation underneath. As mentor, Vidal has reservations about his protege. In his fictional re-creations of our nation's political life--"Burr," "Lincoln," "1876," "Washington D.C."--Vidal first-named his way from the Revolution and the Jackson era, to the Civil War, to the robber-baron Gilded Age, to a stretch running from the later New Deal into the McCarthy days.

It's hardly news that Gore Vidal can write brilliantly when he chooses to, and some of these essays reveal him at his best. With frightening clarity, he strips away the patriotic rhetoric of Oliver North's defenders and exposes the threat the Iran-Contra affair poses to constitutional government in the United States in "Ollie."

Some talk about the Bill of Rights and others use it--testing the power of the freedom enshrined. Gore Vidal does both--exquisitely. Love him or hate him, Vidal is one of the smartest, most provocative and productive writers in the country. Author of five plays, six collections of essays and 22 novels, he has also worked on numerous screenplays.

Actors love to "stretch," taking that out-of-my-wheelhouse part that subverts typecasting. For two TV nice guys, Mike Farrell, 71, the beloved B.J. Hunnicutt of "MASH," and Jim Parrack, 29, who plays puppy-dog Hoyt Fortenberry on "True Blood," the Blank Theatre Company's production of Edmund White's "Terre Haute" offers a daunting stretch. The 2006 drama is based on imagined encounters between only-the-names-are-changed versions of writer Gore Vidal and Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

At 82, Gore Vidal is America's most formidable man of letters. The page of previously published work included in the front matter of this latest volume -- "The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal" -- lists 24 novels, a nonfiction book, two collections of short stories, six plays, 11 volumes of essays and two memoirs. It's a formal list that leaves out the screenplays and collaborations done as work for hire, much of it of some distinction. This is a body of work that fairly seethes with contention and indignation, but what animates -- and elevates -- it is the unmatched beauty of the prose.

"CALIGULA," the notorious toga epic that scandalized audiences in 1980, is not one of cinema's finest moments, but it is one of its most fascinating monuments to excess. In keeping with that spirit of indulgence, this tale of the depraved boy emperor and the sexual appetites and torture techniques of 1st century Rome is being reissued on DVD this week in a curiously comprehensive (if wholly unnecessary) three-disc "imperial edition."

Many speakers have recited the words of the 16th president of the United States as framed by Aaron Copland in his "Lincoln Portrait." "Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history," is how it begins. Carl Sandburg gave the premiere. Years later, Marian Anderson, with Copland conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra, spoke from a place deep within. Adlai Stevenson was statesmanlike yet poignant. Copland himself delivered the text as matter-of-fact straight talk, accepting its truths as self-evident.

IN an era when droves of American writers have deserted the novel for the cozier pleasures of the confessional -- and when pouring your heart out, preferably on television, has become a national sport -- Gore Vidal remains an unlikely memoirist. Long ago, he pronounced himself "the least autobiographical of novelists."

IN an era when droves of American writers have deserted the novel for the cozier pleasures of the confessional -- and when pouring your heart out, preferably on television, has become a national sport -- Gore Vidal remains an unlikely memoirist. Long ago, he pronounced himself "the least autobiographical of novelists."

For years now, the promise of a new Gore Vidal book has been something to get the blood running or boiling. No other American writer has maintained quite such a radical, iconoclastic vision of his nation's past, and nowhere has Vidal been more provocative than in what he calls his "narratives of empire," a series of historical novels tracing the American republic from its beginnings to what he sees as its degeneration into a global, quasi-totalitarian behemoth.

"I guess there is something wrong with me, Mr. Beckman, because I can't for the life of me see what business it is of anyone else what I do." So says the protagonist of "The Zenner Trophy" -- an exceptionally bright young man about to be expelled from a fashionable prep school over an ongoing affair with another youth.

Richard Rapaport's story about Gore Vidal's political dalliances outlined a man who sought to bring intelligence and consideration to American politics ("The Great Gorino," May 7). I read it at a time when either one of those could change the face of this country. James Welch Orange