Welcome to the introduction to The Gore Vidal Index. Follow the links in the index on the left of your screen to read some writing about and by Vidal. If you came right to this introductory essay and don’t have an index in a frame on the left, then click here . Gore Vidal published his first novel, Williwaw, in 1946 at the age of 21. A precocious talent, he began writing poems and stories as a young teen-ager and took his first stab at novels before he was out of high school. He finally finished one when, as a 19-year-old aboard a World War II ship in the Aleutians, he began a story of men at sea and continued it while recovering in a hospital, the victim of rheumatoid arthritis. Critics received the book well, and Vidal – whose grandfather was a senator and whose father, a pioneer aviator, worked for the Roosevelt administration – set out on his own career as a novelist rather than the family career of politics and privilege.

Harry Kloman Univeristy of Pittsburgh