World-Renowned Author Gore Vidal on 9/11
Jay Parini writes: Gore Vidal is a novelist, essayist, playwright, and provocateur whose career has spanned six decades, beginning in the years immediately following World War II and continuing into the early years of the 21st century. In addition to a major sequence of seven novels about American history, and such satirical novels as Myra Breckinridge and Duluth, he has written dozens of television plays, film scripts, over 100 essays, and three mystery novels under a pseudonym. Taken as a whole, this seemingly varied work has an uncanny unity, exhibiting a tone of easy familiarity with the world of politics and letters, an urbane wit, and a supreme self-confidence on the part of the writer. Vidal’s lineage in American literature may be traced back to Henry James, the sophisticated American from the upper echelons of society who mingles with European sophisticates, and Mark Twain, the raw humorist and critic of American empire.
