Empire

About The Author

GORE VIDAL wrote his first novel, Williwaw (1946), at the age of nineteen while overseas in World War II.

During four decades as a writer, Vidal has written novels, plays, short stories and essays. He has also been a political activist. As a Democratic candidate for Congress from upstate New York, he received the most votes of any Democrat in a half century. From 1970 to 1972 he was co-chairman of the People’s Party. In California’s 1982 Democratic primary for U.S. Senate, he polled a half million votes, and came in second in a field of nine.

In 1948 Vidal wrote the highly praised international best seller The City and the Pillar. This was followed by The Judgment of Paris and the prophetic Messiah. In the fifties Vidal wrote plays for live television and films for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. One of the television plays became the successful Broadway play Visit to a Small Planet (1957). Directly for the theater he wrote the prize-winning hit The Best Man (1960).

In 1964 Vidal returned to the novel. In succession, he created three remarkable works: Julian, Washington, D.C., Myra Breckinridge. Each was a number-one best seller in the United States and England. In 1973 Vidal published his most popular novel, Burr, as well as a volume of collected essays, Homage to Daniel Shays. In 1976 he published yet another number-one best seller, 1876, a part of his on-going American chronicle, which now consists of-in chronological order-Burr, Lincoln, 1876, Empire, and Washington, D.C.

In 1981 Vidal published Creation, “his best novel,” according to the New York Times. In 1982 Vidal won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism for his collection of essays, The Second American Revolution. A propos Duluth (1983), Italo Calvino wrote (La Repubblica, Rome): “Vidal’s development… along that line from Myra Breckinridge to Duluth is crowned with great success, not only for the density of comic effects, each one filled with meaning, not only for the craftsmanship in construction, put together like a clock-work which fears no word processor, but because this latest book holds its own built-in theory, that which the author calls his ‘après-poststructuralism.’ I consider Vidal to be a master of that new form which is taking shape in world literature and which we may call the hyper-novel or the novel elevated to the square or to the cube.”