Gore Vidal from the archive – Palimpsest

After half a century as a great novelist and America’s finest essayist, in 1995 Gore Vidal got round to writing… well, not an autobiography, but at any rate a memoir. Why a memoir? Gore told Tim that by the age of seventy he found that he figured in hundreds of other people’s memoirs, and that from his point of view they had almost all got it wrong. Whether this was due to self-serving lapses in memory or shameless lying, Gore decided to proffer a few corrections. If this also meant indulging in a spot of high class gossip, that was OK too. He had plenty to gossip about. Vidal had … Continue reading →