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Just as Vidal’s work as a playwright and screenwriter came about in part through financial necessity, so did his work as an essayist. In the early 1950s, he found that he could make some extra income writing for magazines and journals, and so he did. Soon he came to enjoy this role, although he could not have known these little pieces – which grew bigger as time went on – would bring him perhaps his widest fame. Many Vidal enthusiasts now consider his essays to be more important than his novels, and even those who like his novels realize that they expound upon the themes he examines so well in his critical nonfiction. A number of European publishers have enjoyed and published Vidal’s essays, although surprisingly, not as widely as his novels. His essays have been periodically translated into French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Serbian and Hungarian. He’s also a popular commentator in the United Kingdom, where all of his American essay collections have appeared, along with a few unique British collections.

In addition to all of the nonfiction written by Vidal, numerous scholars have written book-length works about him. The largest of these is Fred Kaplan’s 1999 authorized biography, although Vidal – who gave Kaplan access to his diaries and letters – ultimately disavowed Kaplan’s effort, apparently concerned that the book would not represent him as he had hoped to be represented. The first scholarly tome about Vidal, an eponymous critical study of his work, appeared in 1968 and was written by Ray Lewis White. Six years later came two books: Bernard F. Dick’s The Apostate Angel: A Critical Study of Gore Vidal; and Myra & Gore: A Book for Vidalophiles, by John Mitzel with Steven Abbott, consisting of a socio-sexual reading of Myra Breckinridge and a lengthy interview with Vidal reprinted from the journal Fag Rag. Robert F. Kiernan published another eponymous critical study in 1983; Jay Parini, Vidal’s literary executor, compiled Gore Vidal: Writer Against the Grain, a collection of scholarly essays, in 1992; and Susan Baker and Curtis S. Gibson published Gore Vidal: A Critical Companion in 1997, offering a series of original essays on Vidal’s books from various critical perspectives (deconstructive, feminist, Marxist, new historicist, etc.). Finally, for those fluent in French, there’s Nicole Bensoussan’s Gore Vidal: l’iconoclaste, a 1997 critical study, not yet translated into English, that covers everything from Myra and the other inventions to the novels of ancient and American history.

In general, Vidal’s essays discuss four topics: literature, politics, sex and himself. Rarely is a topic exclusive to one essay, for Vidal finds plenty of crossovers between them. He has used this work to develop a political ideology that he continued to explore in his novels of American history, and many of his other novels, particularly his inventions, clearly dramatize his assertions about human sexuality. As for his views on literature: They have led him to write particular kinds of novels, although literary subjects rarely come up in the novels themselves. Vidal has long maintained that the novelist, once a respected category of artist in American society, has lost his prestige to the moving picture – a medium in which Vidal himself has joyfully dabbled for decades.

Rocking the Boat (1962) After 10 years of publishing essays periodically in both popular and literary magazines, Vidal finally collected them in this volume, which includes pieces written between 1951 and 1961. The oldest piece in the book is “The Making of a Hero and a Legend: Richard Hillary,” a book review that first appeared in The New York Review of Books on Feb. 11, 1951. Vidal divides Rocking the Boat – the title is somewhat self-congratulatory – into four parts: Politics, Theater, Books, Personal. He opens it with an introduction in which he tells us, with characteristic modesty: “Rereading one’s own past commentary is like going through an album of old photographs. Did I really part my hair in that peculiar way? Was I ever that thin? I have kept several unflattering snapshots in the interest of truth, and I have done almost no touching-up.” Still, unable to resist amending himself, he includes an appendix that adds a few thought to a few of the essays. One of the more significant essays in Rocking the Boat is “A Note on the Novel,” originally published in 1956 in the New York Review of Books. In the essay, Vidal begins to expound upon a theme that he would return to often: Despite the presence of good novelists, the novel is dead or dying, he argues, because readers no longer give the form the kind of cultural weight they once did. Finally, Rocking the Boat contains the essay “Ladders to Heaven: Novelists and Critics of the 1940s,” which Vidal first published in New World Writing #3, a multi-authored 1953 paperback anthology of essays and short stories. What’s significant here is that Vidal originally published the essay under the pseudonym “Libra” because he also had a short story (“The Ladies in the Library”) under his own name in the book, and because he was one of the founders of the anthology series and didn’t want to appear to be too prolific in its pages. So the essay’s republication here unmasks yet another Vidalian pseudonym.

Reflections Upon a Sinking Ship (1969) Having rocked the boat seven years ago with his first well-received essay collection, Vidal felt the time had come to declare the ship duly sunk and to reflect upon its demise. “With no melodramatic intent,” he writes in the book’s preface, “I have selected a title which seems to me altogether apt this bright savage spring with Martin Luther King dead and now Robert Kennedy. The fact that these deaths occurred at a time when the American empire was sustaining a richly deserved defeat in Asia simply makes for added poignancy, if not tragedy.” And so this collection takes on a heavier tone right from the start. What follows are some of his most provocative essays of the 1960s, including his touchstone piece “The Holy Family,” a look at the Kennedys and their Camelot that first appeared in Esquire, and “The Manchester Book,” another Kennedy-related piece. We also get “French Letters: Theories of the New Novel,” an incisive look at trends in fiction writing that would form the genesis for his novel Myra Breckinridge. The long, detailed, highly intelligent essay first appeared in the journal Encounter in December 1967.

Sex, Death and Money (1969) The huge success of Myra Breckinridge in 1968 led Vidal’s paperback publisher, Bantam, to throw together a collection of his essays in pocket book form for consumption by mass audiences. The book contains only one essay – “The Television Blacklist,” about the homespun ’50s radio and TV personality John Henry Faulk – that appears nowhere else in Vidal’s collected essays. “Sex, death and money are the essential interests of the naked ape,” he writes in a five-page introduction. The essays in the book then go on to cover the gamut of his usual themes.

Homage to Daniel Shays (1973) So popular had Vidal’s essays become with readers that – a mere four years after his previous collection, and barely a decade after his first one – Vidal’s new publisher, Random House, brought together the content of both earlier books, freshened it up with his writing since 1968, and published it all together in one volume covering his writing from 1952 to 1972. Arranged chronologically, the pieces include the hilarious “Doc Reuben” (a rout of Everything You’ve Always Wanted To Know About Sex), tart pieces on his old friends Ana ¯s Nin and Norman Mailer, and poignant tributes to Eleanor Roosevelt and Yukio Mishima. The 44 pieces in the book show Vidal’s full bloom as a challenging and important American essayist. Vidal had originally planned to publish the book under the title On Our Own Now, a line taken from his essay on Mrs. Roosevelt. But shortly before publication – and after Random House had distributed review copies with the first title – Vidal added the titular essay, a grim examination of money, power and property in America, and changed the book’s title accordingly. In England, however, where the patriot Daniel Shays – who led an anti-tax, anti-tyranny rebellion just after the American revolution – was less well known, the book appeared in hardback as Collected Essays: 1952-1972 and in paperback as On Our Own Now.

Matters of Fact and of Fiction (1977) No sex here: just politics and literature, discussed in 17 essays on Louis Auchincloss, Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov, Tennessee Williams, E. Howard Hunt, Ulysses S. Grant, the Adamses, Robert Moses and other people and topics. The collection begins with a witty piece on the banality of best-selling fiction, ends with his “State of the Union” address first printed in Esquire, and in between features “The Hacks of Academe,” an important piece in which Vidal lays out his criticism of literary scholarship. It’s a leaner, headier collection of essays than its immediate predecessor, and the photo of Vidal on the back of the dust jacket finds him stroking his chin ponderously with his index finger.

Sex Is Politics and Vice Versa (1979) For the January 1979 issue of Playboy, Vidal wrote a provocative essay – beautifully illustrated by the magazine – on the relationship between his two favorite topics. Later that year, Los Angeles book publishers Stathis Orphanos and Ralph Sylvester issued the essay in a fine press limited edition, most copies bound in white cloth, but with a limited number bound in black leather. The slender, unpretentious volume is unique in Vidal’s canon. On a colophon page at the end of the book, we learn that Orphanos and Sylvester published “a limited edition of 330 copies. 300 are numbered, 26 lettered, and four bear the printed name of a recipient.” The four people who received personal copies were Orphanos, Sylvester, Vidal – and Christopher Isherwood, Vidal’s long-time friend, who was also well versed in the exigencies of sex and politics The essay itself takes on some of the 1970s’ most odious anti-sex, anti-freedom Rightists, like Phyllis Schlafly, Orrin Hatch, Richard Viguerie and Norman Podhoretz.

Views from a Window: Conversations with Gore Vidal (1980) Teacher/writer Robert Stanton, who published a book-length bibliography of Vidal in 1978, has compiled Vidal’s many published interviews into this one volume. But rather than merely reprinting the interviews, he arranges the comments by topic and tells us where Vidal made each set of remarks. So in a section on “Sexuality,” for example, we first read several pages of material from an interview in Oui magazine, followed without interruption by material from an interview first printed in The Listener, and then by material from a chat Vidal had with Stanton (one of several conducted exclusively for this book). It all flows together smoothly in Q&A form, thanks to Stanton’s helpful organization and Vidal’s gift for trenchant gab. Stanton draws his material from 27 interviews Vidal gave to nearly two dozen publications from 1960 to 1979. The clarity and consistency of his voice dominates this well-done book, originally published by Lyle Stuart and easy to find for sale on used book sites.

The Second American Revolution (1982) Although the title of this 19-essay collection would seem to indicate (correctly) that it deals more with politics than anything else, the book still has some of Vidal’s best 1970s writing about sex and literature. For those who don’t own the fine press special issue of Sex Is Politics, Vidal reprints the essay here for the first time. The title essay is a powerful indictment of homophobia in America – so powerful, in fact, that Vidal’s U.K. publisher scrapped the American title of the book and published the collection as Pink Triangle and Yellow Star. Another highlight is “Christopher Isherwood’s Kind,” a quietly moving tribute to his friend.

Vidal in Venice (1985) This exquisitely mounted cocktail table book, printed on glossy paper, is rife with photo of glorious Venice taken by Tore Gill. Vidal begins the narrative by talking about his family’s roots in Europe, and Gill’s photographs reveal sites possibly linked to his family name, like a “Vidale” family gravestone in Friuli, or the “Rio de S. Vidal,” a small canal that passes behind the Church of S. Vidal. The rest of the book explores the history, culture and splendor of a city that Vidal calls “perhaps the most beautiful clich © on earth.” Although no other author’s name appears on the book’s front cover, the title page discreetly says, “Edited by George Armstong.” In fact, according to Vidal’s biographer Fred Kaplan, Armstrong wrote virtually all of the text for the book, and despite Vidal’s insistence that Armstrong get credit for it, the publisher demanded that Vidal’s name appear as the sole author. To accompany the printed edition of this book, Vidal did a video edition of the text for British television. It’s available commercially on two 55-minute videos. Pictured here, above left, is the vibrant front cover of the U.K. edition of the book. A different, less vibrant image appears on the cover of the U.S. edition (above right). But the back cover of both editions pictures Vidal sitting casually on the Doge’s throne in Venice.

Armageddon? (1987) This book testifies to Vidal’s popularity in the United Kingdom: Although many of its 20 essays, written from 1983 to 1987, would appear the next year in the American collection At Home, U.K. audiences apparently couldn’t wait. So Vidal’s U.K. publisher issued this collection, one of three with no page-for-page American counterpart (in the way that The Second American Revolution and Pink Triangle and Yellow Star are identical books with different titles). In his brief preface, Vidal admits that the book has no theme: “Over the years,” he writes, “I have noted with what nervousness writers apologize for collections of random pieces that they have written. They seem to think that a collection of essays ought to have a single numinous theme, like dentistry or the writer’s own sweet self.” Still, the essays here tend to discuss literature and politics, with an occasional personal note thrown in. The title piece – notice the question mark – explores “the ancient Acting President” (i.e. Ronald Reagan) at the end of his administration, although the essay wanders through a variety of contemporary topics, ending with talk of Mikhail Gorbachev, Norman Mailer, and Vidal’s proposed constitutional amendment that no president be allowed to believe in an afterlife.

At Home (1988) This American essay collection, not published per se in the U.K. because of Armageddon?, covers the years 1982 to 1989, thus starting one year earlier than its British cousin and ending one year later. It contains 24 essays, several of them rather personal and autobiographical: “At Home in Washington, D.C.,” “At Home on a Roman Street,” “Mongolia!” and “How I Do What I Do If Not Why” among them. He also writes about Richard Nixon, Tennessee Williams, Anthony Burgess and “Ronnie and Nancy: A Life in Pictures.” This book contains the same introduction as Armageddon?, confessing to a lack of unifying theme, although on the whole, the writing in At Home suits its title.

A View from the Diners Club (1991) Here’s a unique-to-the-U.K. edition with no American counterpart whatsoever: Americans would have to wait for the comprehensive United States after the publication of At Home, but Vidal’s British readers got this collection of 16 essays written from 1987 to 1991. He divides them into two categories, “Book Chat” and “Politics,” and discusses Henry Miller, Dawn Powell, Oscar Wilde, H.L. Mencken, Ted Kennedy and “The National Security State.” In the preface he says, “Since I shall not write a memoir, I have included more personal references – or rather my personal responses to others – than one ought, strictly, to do in reviewing.” Of course, he would write a memoir, thereby invalidating his long-time assertions that he would never do any such thing.

Screening History (1992) “As I now move, graciously, I hope, toward the door marked Exit,” Vidal begins this unusual little book, “it occurs to me that the only thing I ever really liked to do was go to the movies.” Written for and delivered at Harvard’s William E. Massey Sr. Lecture Series in the History of American Civilization, and published by Harvard University Press, Screening History is a memoir about both the movies and Vidal’s love for them. The book is handsomely illustrated with glossy photos of old movies and some images of Vidal’s childhood, including a famous shot of his 10-year-old former self behind the controls of a prototype Hammond Y-1, an airplane he actually flew in 1936, thus making him the youngest person at the time to fly a plane. Of course, politics creep into the narrative, especially when he writes about Lincoln on film. The cover of the book shows Vidal alone in an empty movie theater, looking over his shoulder at the camera, while on-screen is a scene from Gore Vidal’s Billy the Kid, a teleplay he wrote in 1989 based on his 1955 drama for live TV. The scene features Val Kilmer as Billy and Vidal in a cameo as a preacher.

The Decline and Fall of the American Empire (1992) The American Presidency (1998) Odonian Press, which takes its name from the Ursula Le Guin novel The Dispossessed, publishes books of liberal-to-Left social and political ideology, donating at least 10% of its annual after-tax income to organizations working for social justice. So naturally Odonian finds Vidal’s views on corporate and political empire-building a natural fit. In these two little books, each 88 pages long (plus index), Vidal discusses American politics in his usual pungent way. The essays in The Decline and Fall of the American Empire have all appeared elsewhere; the essays in The American Presidency are adapted from a television special Vidal did for The History Channel and the BBC. Nonetheless, bringing the material together thematically has created two nice pocket books of political thought, each presented attractively with colorful glossy covers

United States (1993) This weighty tome is more than a cocktail-table book: At 1,295 pages in length, it could serve as the entire cocktail table. Pulling together virtually all of his essays published from 1952 to 1992, it’s the definitive collection for Vidalophiles or for people who happened onto his writing late in his career and who want to catch up with his nonfiction canon. The book includes the essays written after At Home, but most of United States has appeared in one or more of the earlier collections. Still, for putting it all in one place – and perhaps for having attained “venerable” status” – Vidal won the National Book Award for nonfiction, and despite this book’s size, it sold well and went into numerous printings both in the U.S. and England.

Palimpsest: A Memoir (1995) For at least a quarter of a century, Vidal always swore that he would never write a memoir. But when biographers began to show interest in his life, he decided that he’d better get his own version on the record before it was to late. The result is one of the most entertaining and beautifully written books in his canon, although not the revelatory work some had hoped to read. Palimpsest is a reflection on a variety of histories – political, literary, personal – and the intersections of the three. It’s often fond and gentle, yet sometimes almost pathologically cruel and bitter. To people unfamiliar with his life and work, this memoir will read like a brash rumination on the political figures and literati of the 20th-century American Empire. To his followers, it fills in a few (but only a few) of the intriguing emotional gaps of a man who says he fell in love once at age 14 and has never felt the need to do so again. Thus in the end he declares this book to be a love story, for he writes most movingly about Jimmie Trimble, the boy who made him feel whole like no one has since their time together in the 1930s. Vidal says he loses concentration when he makes eye contact with someone. Paul Newman, his friend since the 1950s, once told him, “I’ve never understood how you loners do it.” It’s a compelling question, but Palimpsest ultimately provides no answer.

Virgin Islands (1997) Once again comes a collection that has no American counterpart: Published in the U.K. only, it presents essays written from 1992-1997. Part I covers literature, but Parts II and III are all about politics, as his essays in recent years have increasingly become. From FDR and Truman to the United Nations and American imperialism, it’s all here once more. He titled this book Virgin Islands, he says, because it follows United States and is thus a dependency of that larger book. At the end of the book, just for his British fans, he presents a map of the United Kingdom showing the location of U.S. military installations there and a charting showing American military spending on those installations.

Sexually Speaking: Collected Sex Writings (1999) The small gay and lesbian Cleis Press – born in Pittsburgh, but now located in San Francisco – brought together 14 of Vidal’s essays on sexual matters, from “Sex and the Law” and “Sex Is Politics” to “Eleanor Roosevelt” and “J’accuse,” his brief 1998 tract accusing Republican U.S. Sen. Trent Lott of murder for inciting fatal violence against homosexuals. The book includes an introduction by editor Donald Weise, a reprint of the interview by Mitzel and Abbott from the 1974 book Myra & Gore, and an interview with Vidal conducted by Larry Kramer in 1992. Vidal granted the rights to his essays free of charge for this book, which is the biggest ever published by Cleis in terms of press run and author prestige. The book is available in both hardback and paperback and, as of April 2001, in a Spanish translation, Sexualmente Hablando: Articulos Escogidos Sobre Sexo.

The Last Empire (2001) What fortuitous timing: Vidal’s first essay collection of the 21st Century arrived in stores right in the middle of the controversy over his involvement in the execution of Timothy McVeigh, the conviced bomber of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. In May 2001, just weeks before McVeigh’s first execution date – and before they discovered that the FBI withheld documents from McVeigh’s defense team – Vidal announced he would be one of McVeigh’s five invited witnesses and that he would write about the execution for Vanity Fair. The two began a correspondence when McVeigh read Vidal’s October 1998 Vanity Fair essay “The War at Home,” which appears in this collection as “Shredding the Bill of Rights.” In interviews about McVeigh, Vidal said he shared the confessed killer’s views about the loss of personal freedom in American and referred to McVeigh as “a fine young man.” And while he did condemn McVeigh’s actions, few newspaper readers saw the distinction between the action and the philosophy that led to it. The Last Empire contains 48 pieces on literature and politics, most of which were first collected in the 1997 U.K. volume Virgin Islands. Kenneth Starr, Frank Sinatra, John Updike, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, Mark Twain: They all get the Vidalian treatment. Curiously, there’s no Foreword or Afterword to accompany The Last Empire. But the bound galley proof of the book – distributed to book critics by Doubleday in the months before the publication of the finished book – contains a brief Foreward. Why it was removed only Vidal and Doubleday can answer. But here is what it said: “I am writing this note a dozen days before the Inauguration of the loser of the year 2000 presidential election. Lost republic as well as last empire. We are now faced with a Japanese seventeenth-century-style arrangement: a powerless Mikado ruled by a shogun vice president and his Pentagon warrior counselors. Do they dream, as did the shoguns of yore, of the conquest of China? We shall know more soon, I should think, than late. Sayonara. Gore Vidal – 11 January 2001.”

http://www.pitt.edu/~kloman/vidalframe.html