posted on Oct, 4 2011 @ 04:48 PM
GORE VIDAL(1925-), the master essayist of our age, has been called the best all-around American man of letters since Edmund Wilson(1895-1972). He has
written a great deal about American society and its media. He began his writing career at nineteen in 1944, the year I was born. In 1962, the year I
prepared for my university entrance exams, and begin my own serious literary and academic study, Vidal published his first book of essays entitled:
Rocking the Boat. Books of his essays and interviews, novels and memoirs kept appearing as I entered the teaching profession in the 1960s and finally
retired in the 1990s. He’s still going, although not as strong at 85 and often in a wheel-chair.-Ron Price with thanks to Harry Kloman, “Gore
Vidal’s Essays, Interviews and Memoirs: 1963-Present,” 2005.
He always impressed me with
his remarkable wit and talent:
5 decades of scintillating words
in books & live whenever I saw
him on TV…He saw the moral-
intellectual hollowness of USA
politics at the same I did—in the
early 1960s with those Kennedys
and so he spent the rest of his life
writing books and essays--a lot of
other stuff(1)---thinking on paper for
a world slowly captured by electronic
distractions. Still, we go on talking about
books and writing them pretending not to
notice that the church is empty and people
have gone over to attend to other gods in
silence or new words. Surely it’s not that
bad, is it Gore? Is it?(2)
1 The Washington Post calls him “the master essayist of our age.” See David Barsamian, “Citizen Gore Vidal,” These Times, 3 November 2008
2 George Scialabba, “Civic Virtues: Gore Vidal’s Selected Essays,” The Nation, 8 October 2008.
Ron Price
For the ATS
Internet Site
On: 5 October 2011