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- "Reflections Upon a Sinking Ship"
- "Rocking the Boat"
- "The Last Empire: Essays 1992 - 2000"
In 2003, PBS featured Vidal in its American Masters series. His career spanned six decades, it said. He reflected "uncanny unity, a tone of easy familiarity with the world of politics and letters, an urbane wit, and supreme self-confidence as a writer" and sociopolitical critic.
Born in 1925, his web site called his maternal roots "thoroughly political." As a boy, he lived with his grandfather, Senator TP Gore. His father, Eugene Vidal, served as FDR's Bureau of Air Commerce director.
His mother, Nina Gore Vidal, divorced when Vidal was 10. She married Hugh Auchincloss. He divorced her and married Jackie Kennedy's mother. It established a connection between Vidal and the Kennedy clan. It lasted through JFK's presidency.
In 1943, he enlisted in the Army at age 17. At age 19, he became a warrant officer JG and first mate of the army ship FS 35. On night watch in port, he wrote his first novel, Williwaw.
Colombian novelist/journalist/Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez praised Vidal's "magnificent series of historical novels or novelized histories." They cover American life from the 18th to the 21st century.
New York Times literary critic Harold Bloom called him "a masterly American historical novelist, now wholly matured, who has found his truest subject, which is our national political history during precisely those years when our political and military histories were as one, one thing and one thing only: the unwavering will of Abraham Lincoln to keep the states united."He added he "demonstrates that his narrative achievement is vastly underestimated by American academic criticism, an injustice has has repaid amply in his essayist attacks upon the academy...."
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