“In the decades that followed, we spoke on the phone every week-for periods on a daily basis…He proved more than helpful to me as a young writer, reading drafts of my books, offering frank critiques and encouragement.”

“It would be fair to say, in a crude way, that I was looking for a father, and he seemed in search of a son,” Parini writes in his introduction. His friendship with Vidal began in the 1980s, when, in his 30s and on sabbatical in southern Italy, Parini and his family lived below a massive villa occupied by Vidal. Given this context, why has Parini, a poet, biographer, novelist, and college professor, devoted so much time and thought to this latest Vidal biography? Because it is a labor of love, I surmise, and because he is discharging a debt. Stimpson, Richard Poirier, and Italo Calvino. As far as an assessment of Vidal’s writing is concerned, in 1992 Jay Parini himself edited a collection of critical essays, Gore Vidal: Writer Against the Grain, with contributions from Harold Bloom, Stephen Spender, Catharine R. And Sympathy for the Devil: Four Decades of Friendship with Gore Vidal (2015) by Michael Mewshaw, more of an anecdotal memoir than a biography, rounds out the lot at 224 pages.

Pink Triangle: The Feuds and Private Lives of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote and Famous Members of their Entourage (2014) by celebrity biographer Darwin Porter weighs in at 700 pages. In Bed with Gore Vidal: Hustlers, Hollywood, and the Private World of an American Master (2013) is described by its first-time author Tim Teeman as “a sexual biography,” and delivers the expected in a brief 296 pages. The first was Gore Vidal: A Biography (1999) by Fred Kaplan, authorized by the subject, begun and abandoned by journalist Walter Clemons, and-at 864 pages-encyclopedic. The prolific and protean author (1925–2012) left over 80 volumes of writing-novels, plays, screenplays, teleplays, memoirs, collections of essays, political pamphlets-in which he makes his ideas about an extraordinary range of topics clear, elegant, bitchy, and fascinating.įour biographical views of Vidal precede this one. Why read or write a biography of Gore Vidal? Jay Parini has provided an important slice of literary and cultural history, as well as a portrait of a man, knitting together the many themes of Gore Vidal’s life.Įmpire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidalby Jay Parini.

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