Eugene Luther Gore Vidal ( vih-DAHL; born Eugene Louis Vidal, October 3, 1925 – July 31, 2012) was an American writer and public intellectual known for his cynical epigrammatic wit. His novels and essays criticized the social and sexual norms he perceived as driving American life. Vidal was heavily involved in politics, and unsuccessfully sought office twice as a Democratic Party candidate, first in 1960 to the United States House of Representatives (for New York), and later in 1982 to the United States Senate (for California). A grandson of U.S. Senator Thomas Gore, Vidal was born into an upper-class political family. His political and cultural essays were published in The Nation, the New Statesman, the New York Review of Books, and Esquire magazines. As a public intellectual, Vidal's topical debates on sex, politics, and religion with other intellectuals and writers occasionally turned into quarrels with the likes of William F. Buckley Jr. and Norman Mailer. As a novelist, Vidal explored the nature of corruption in public and private life. His style of narration evoked the time and place of his stories and delineated his characters' psychology. His third novel, The City and the Pillar (1948), about a dispassionately presented male homosexual relationship, offended conservative book reviewers' literary, political, and moral sensibilities. Vidal's historical novel Julian (1964) recreates the world of Julian the Apostate (r. AD 361–363), the Roman emperor who attempted to reestablish Roman polytheism to counter Christianity. Myra Breckinridge (1968) is a social satire that explores the mutability of gender roles and sexual orientation as social constructs established by social mores. In Burr (1973) and Lincoln (1984), both part of his Narratives of Empire series of novels, each protagonist is presented as "A Man of the People" and as "A Man" in a narrative exploration of how the public and private facets of personality affect U.S. politics.
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