Word: vidal
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...reviewer. Among other things, he held a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Virginia (subject of his thesis: James Joyce), and had taught as an assistant professor at Princeton for seven years. Even so, he found preparing for this week's cover story on Novelist Gore Vidal to be a rigorous exercise, since his preparations required reading or rereading a 23-volume shelf including 15 novels, various essay collections and other works by his subject. Says Gray: "I came to admire Vidal for his accomplishments in an old but honorable role, the well-rounded man of letters...
...really like Andy Hardy, a starry-eyed boy who liked to have a good time," mused Author Gore Vidal about his latest subject, the Roman Emperor Caligula, who once appointed his horse as Consul and twice abducted brides of noblemen in the middle of their weddings. "He was a hedonist." Vidal's screenplay is scheduled to go before the cameras in Rome next year. Appropriately, the $7 million production will be financed by a 20th century hedonist, Penthouse Publisher Bob Guccione...
...like plants growing and dying a billion times a second in a rich, dank forest--you can hear the process. There's something in the language that achieves this: short sentences appearing and vanishing like postcards and daguerrotypes. Doctorow doesn't invest his people with modern concerns like Gore Vidal does, in his historical fiction, adding sex and neurosis and perversity of motive. The grainy literariness of the ragtime people is inviolable--ladies constantly fleeing to the garden, derbies dotting riverside parks on a Sunday...
...City announced plans to display the long-secret court records of Aaron Burr's 1836 divorce case, in which the 80-year-old ex-Vice President was accused of adultery, at least one part-time historian was unexcited. "It's all in my book," points out Gore Vidal, who pieced the story together accurately for his historical novel Burr, without aid of court records. "I have never seen them. I've just gone on other people's word." Of Burr's long-lived virility, Vidal added: "Burr was a small, trim little man, and small...
Dabney attacked Vidal mainly for his characterization of Washington as variously having a "cold, serpent's nature," casting a "serpent's glance" and employing "serpentine cunning." No major historian or biographer of Washington has ever before found any such reptilian element in Washington's personality, Dabney contended...