v.
orig. Eugene Luther Vidal
born Oct. 3, 1925, West Point, N.Y., U.S.
U.S. novelist, playwright, and essayist.
Vidal began publishing his writings soon after his wartime army service. Though he wrote stage plays and television and film screenplays, he is best known for his irreverent and intellectually adroit novels. The City and the Pillar (1948) became notorious for its homoerotic subject matter. Myra Breckenridge (1968) was acclaimed for its wild satire. His other novels, many of them historical and most of them best-sellers, include Julian (1964), Washington, D.C. (1967), Burr (1974), 1876 (1976), and Lincoln (1984). He also published several essay collections and the memoir Palimpsest (1996). Known for his iconoclastically leftist political analyses, he twice ran unsuccessfully for Congressional office.