Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal. By Jay Parini. Penguin Random House; 480 pages; $35. Published in the UK as “Every Time A Friend Succeeds Something Inside Me Dies: The Life of Gore Vidal”. Little, Brown; £25.
“NEVER lose an opportunity to have sex or be on television” is a familiar Gore Vidal quip—and, as Jay Parini notes in a marvellous new biography, Vidal enthusiastically followed his own advice. The sex was almost always homosexual; invariably “on top”; and usually in the afternoon, to allow for disciplined writing in the morning and extravagant socialising in the evening. For Vidal, television meant a show of eloquent punditry projected on both sides of the Atlantic, but most memorably—as any trawl through YouTube will confirm—in the form of confrontations on American chat shows with William Buckley, editor of the conservative National Review, and with a pugnacious fellow writer, Norman Mailer.
Vidal died in 2012 at the age of 86. He wrote so many novels, screenplays, television shows, literary commentaries and essays that he ought to...
from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1hsudoQ
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