Eugene Luther Gore Vidal net worth is $30 Million. Also know about Eugene Luther Gore Vidal bio, salary, height, age weight, relationship and more …

Eugene Luther Gore Vidal Wiki Biography

Eugene Louis Vidal Jr. was born on 3 October 1925, in West Point, New York State USA, to Nina Gore, an actress, and Eugene Luther Vidal, an aeronautics instructor and aviation pioneer. He was a writer and public intellectual, best known for his books “Julian”, “Myra Breckinridge”, “Lincoln”, the political work “United States: Essays 1952-1992”, and the memoir “Palimpsest”.

A prolific writer, how rich was Gore Vidal? Sources state that Vidal has amassed a fortune over $30 million. His net worth has been amassed mostly through his writing and political career.

Vidal’s parents divorced during his teenage years, and both of them eventually remarried. After their divorce, his mother took him to live with her in Virginia. He attended the Sidwell Friends School and St. Albans School in Washington, D.C. and later the Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire. When he was 17 years old, he joined the US Army, and worked as an office clerk within the US Army Air Force. It was during this time that Vidal wrote his first piece, a military novel called “Williwaw”, which he released in 1946. Since then, he went on to release numerous novels, such as the 1948 “The City and the Pillar”, which shocked the public with its examination of homosexuality. His net worth began to grow.

During the ’50s he started to write political and editorial essays, plays and screenplays, finding great success. These included the plays “Visit to a Small Planet”, “The Death of Billy the Kid” and “The Best Man: A Play about Politics”, which earned him critical acclaim and significantly increased his popularity and his net worth also.

The ’60s saw the release of Vidal’s famous novels “Julian”, covering the life of the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate, “Washington, D.C.”, portraying the presidential era of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and “Myra Breckinridge”, a satire lampooning both transsexuality and contemporary American culture. Achieving great critical and commercial success with all three pieces, his net worth grew larger.

From the mid-’60s to 2000, Vidal concentrated on historical novels, creating the seven-book series called “Narratives of Empire”, consisting of “Burr”, “Lincoln”, “1876”, “Empire”, “Hollywood”, “Washington, D.C.” and “The Golden Age”. He also focused on topical satire, releasing the novels “Myron”, “Kalki”, “Duluth”, “Live from Golgotha” and “The Smithsonian Institution”. All contributed to his wealth.

Speaking about non-fiction, Vidal’s most notable works covering socio-political, sexual, historical and literary subjects include the essay anthologies “Armageddon” and “United States: Essays 1952–92”, winning the National Book Award for Non-fiction for the latter one, as well as his memoir, “Palimpsest”. These pieces reinforced his status of an icon, boosting his fame and fortune.

Aside from writing, Vidal was deeply involved in politics, being a public intellectual identified with the liberal politics of the old Democratic Party. He unsuccessfully ran for Congress in the ’60s, and for governor of California in the ’80s. His political career gathered him a huge fan base, and also added to his net worth.

Vidal was a popular talk-show guest, and worked as an actor, making appearances in films such as “Roma”, “Bob Roberts”, “With Honors”, “Gattaca” and “Igby Goes Down”, further improving his wealth.

In his private life, Vidal was bisexual and was in a long-lasting relationship with Howard Austen fom 1950 until the latter passed away in 2003. Vidal died of pneumonia in 2012, aged 86.

IMDB Wikipedia $30 million 1925 1925-10-3 2012 2012-07-31 5′ 11½” (1.82 m) Actor American California Caligula (1979) Eugene Luther Gore Vidal Eugene Luther Vidal Gore Vidal Net Worth Hollywood Hills July 31 Last Summer (1959) Libra Los Angeles Middle Sexes: Redefining He and She (2005) New York Nina Auchincloss Straight Nina Gore October 3 Phillips Exeter Academy Sidwell Friends School Suddenly The Best Man (1964) Thomas Gore Auchincloss U.S. United States Valerie Vidal Vance Vidal West Point Writer

Eugene Luther Gore Vidal Quick Info

Eugene Luther Gore Vidal Quotes

• I’m all for bringing back the birch, but only between consulting adults.
• What matters finally is not the world’s judgment of oneself but one’s own judgment of the world. Any writer who lacks this final arrogance will not survive very long, especially in America.
• When you get to a certain age, a juicy lawsuit is sometimes the only thing that gets you up in the morning.
• [observation, 1973] The bad movies we made twenty years ago are now regarded in altogether too many circles as important aspects of what the new illiterates want to believe is the only significant art form of the twentieth century. An entire generation has been brought up to admire the product of that era. Like so many dinosaur droppings, the old Hollywood films have petrified into something rich, strange, numinous-golden. For any survivor of the Writers’ Table, it is astonishing to find young directors like Bertolucci, Bogdanovich, Truffaut reverently repeating or echoing or paying homage to the sort of kitsch we created first time round..
• [ on his role at a christening] Always a godfather, never a god.
• [on Ronald Reagan] A triumph of the embalmer’s art.
• [on William F. Buckley] Looks and sounds not unlike Hitler, but without the charm.
• It’s easy to sustain a relationship when sex plays no part and impossible, I have observed, when it does.
• Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.
• (On Anita Bryant) As to Anita’s fear that she’ll be assassinated? The only people who might shoot Anita Bryant are music lovers.
• (When asked by interviewer David Frost if his first sexual experience was heterosexual or homosexual) I was too polite to ask.
• [on writer Carson McCullers] Of all our Southern writers, Carson McCullers is the one most likely to endure.
• Those presidential ninnies should stick to throwing out baseballs and leave the important matters to serious people.
• [on Truman Capote] Capote should be heard, not read.
• [commenting on the giant Jerusalem set for Ben-Hur (1959)] This Jerusalem is the Jerusalem of Jesus Christ. He could move through the city and feel that He was absolutely at home. He would know where to go to order a pizza.
• The George W. Bush people have virtually got rid of Magna Carta and habeas corpus. In a normal republic I would probably have raised an army and overthrown them. It will take a hundred years to put it all back.
• [on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 Democratic Party nomination campaign] I think her strategy is more or less insane. I’d always rather liked her. She’s a perfectly able lawyer . . . But this long campaign, this daily search for the grail, has driven her crazy.
• [on Barack Obama’s 2008 Democratic Party nomination campaign] I liked the idea of him, but he never managed to get my interest. I was brought around by his overall intelligence – specifically when he did his speech on race and religion. He’s our best demagogue since Huey Long or Martin Luther King.
• I never believed in John F. Kennedy’s charisma. He was one of our worst presidents. Robert F. Kennedy was a phony, a little Torquemada and their father [Joseph P. Kennedy] was a crook–should have been in jail.
• But John F. Kennedy had great charm. So has Barack Obama. He’s better educated than Jack. And he’s been a working senator. Jack never went to the office – he wanted the presidency and his father bought it for him.
• [on John McCain’s 2008 Republican presidential campaign] Anyone could beat McCain! I’ve never met anyone in America who has the slightest respect for him. He went to a private school and came bottom of his class. He smashed up his aeroplane and became a prisoner of war, which he is trying to parlay into “war hero”. He’s a goddamned fool. He was on television talking about mortgages, and it was quite clear he does not know what a mortgage is. His head rattles as he walks.
• Shit has its own integrity.
• Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.
• The best thing about being Anglophone is that you have two countries.
• [on post-WW2 America, from 1945-1950] For the first time, the US was not involved in a war. The Depression was over. Suddenly, there were 13 million of us who’d served in the military and were home. There was a cultural burst that Americans had never known before: we became number one for things like ballet. We had dozens of first-rate poets, several not so bad novelists, wonderful music, Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland. It was a great moment, and it lasted for five years. Then the Korean War came, and we’ve never stopped being at war since.
• [on working in Hollywood in the 1950s] We did too much. Someone would ring up and say, “We’ve got a bar, a bedroom and a kind of ballroom. We’ve got Paul Newman and Vincent J. Donehue is going to direct. Can you think of a play?” In three or four days you’d write something to fit the sets and the cast.
• My father was asked, “How do you explain Gore’s courage?” “Courage about what?” replied my father. “It’s not courageous if you don’t care what people think of you.” He had my number. Of course, one does care, but which kind of people is the question.
• William Faulkner told me not to fall into the trap F. Scott Fitzgerald did. He thought you could make something out of a movie. You can’t. Go, get the money, go home, write your books.
• My grandmother would say, “If it’s in the newspapers, it’s just not true.” That was our automatic take.
• [on his 53-year relationship with Howard Austen] It is very easy to sustain a relationship when sex plays no part, and impossible when it does.
• I remember Grandfather, Senator T. P. Gore, always said, “This whole country is based on only one thing: due process of law, involving Habeas Corpus.” The only good thing England gave us was Magna Carta, which he regarded as sacred.
• [on America during the George W. Bush years] Never have so many things gone so wrong all at once. Saboteurs and thieves have been in charge of every part of government.
• The protocols for impeachment are meant to be used. Of course Dick Cheney should be impeached, and then I would impeach the president. They are guilty of high crimes against the Constitution of the United States. We have a bad government, just out of control. We have turned into a very ugly, totalitarian society.
• [on leaving La Rondinaia, Italy, for Hollywood when his partner Howard Austen had required specialist treatment] It was an intelligent thing to live in California, [but now] as the American dictatorship gets going, I don’t know if it’s the right setting to say farewell to the Republic.
• There are no homosexual people, only homosexual acts.
• The only time I went on stage, in the part of Dalton Trumbo, a blacklisted writer on Broadway, was right after Howard [Austen, his companion of 53 years] died. Before I knew it, I was standing out there in front of the audience. It was the best thing I ever did. If you want to drown your grief, play on Broadway.
• [an interview in 2007] I do a lot of reading of the dead. I finally got around after 50 years to reading all of Aristotlex. He’s very good on republics, how they always come a cropper, and why. Required reading. Republics, once lost, don’t easily come back.
• [upon learning of Truman Capote’s death] Good career move.
• It’s realism. Life is mostly luck!
• I don’t go to movies for love, do you?
• Look, homophobia is fed into every child in the United States at birth. It is unrelenting, it never lets up. They asked a whole raft of high school boys across the country a couple years ago, one of those polls about what they would most like to be in life, and what they would hate to be, and so forth, and what they would most hate to be was homosexual. There wasn’t anyone, not one, who just skipped the question. They all said ‘oh no, that’s the worst thing you could be.’
• There is not one human problem that could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.
• To write a script today means working for a committee of people who know nothing about movies, as opposed, say, to real estate or the higher art of bookkeeping.
• [interview on Swedish radio, 2004] We pay large taxes to the government. The rich don’t but the average working person does. We’re the only First-World country that gets nothing back. There’s no health service. The educational system is pre-Copernicus. It’s a scandal. But the Americans don’t know it because they have never been told about other countries. They just know they’re bad.
• Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say and not giving a damn.
• [regarding the US being an empire] It is a pointless empire, which gives a satirist like me great pleasure, the fact that nothing makes any sense.
• I find stupidity very exciting. And I’m excited all day long.
• [5/23/04] One day the Bush family may develop a conscience and they may develop some idea of statesmanship. But that day is nowhere near, that the Bush family will ever be anything but dishonorable. And so, we can’t wait, but we’ve got to discuss how they have dishonored us and what they have done wrong, and replace them – with anything, at the moment.
• Politics is made up of two words: “Poli,” which is Greek for “many,” and “tics,” which are bloodsucking insects.
• [in 1988] I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity or Islam — good people, yes, but any religion based on a single, well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system.
• I’m a born-again atheist.
• The idea of a good society is something you do not need a religion and eternal punishment to buttress; you need a religion if you are terrified of death.
• [interview in “The Secular Humanist Bulletin”, Summer 1995] Once people get hung up on theology, they’ve lost sanity forever. More people have been killed in the name of Jesus Christ than any other name in the history of the world.
• Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. [William Shakespeare] has perhaps twenty players, and Tennessee Williams has about five, and Samuel Beckett one – and maybe a clone of that one. I have ten or so, and that’s a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.
• A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.
• [asked to describe himself in one word] Realist.
• In the next few years, the empire is going to strike back at the Internet in the interest of protecting our children from porn, drugs and terrorism – all of which the U.S. government will claim is being peddled by the Internet. There is not a trick they won’t pull to get control. After all, what better way to control everyone’s mind, or at least the input of information?
• A talent for drama is not a talent for writing, but is an ability to articulate human relationships.
• It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.

Eugene Luther Gore Vidal Important Facts

• Had four Goddaughters Elinor Newman born April 8th 1959 Melissa Newman born September 27th 1961 Claire Newman born April 21st 1965 Eva Amurri born March 15th 1985.
• Gore’s paternal grandfather, Felix Luther Vidal, was born in Wisconsin, to an Austrian immigrant father, Eugen Fidel Vidal, of Romansh heritage, and a Swiss immigrant mother, Emma de Traxler Hartmann, of Swiss-German descent. Gore’s other ancestry was German, Scottish, English, Scots-Irish (Northern Irish), and Irish.
• A 1995 BBC documentary on him, Omnibus: Gore Vidal’s Gore Vidal Part 1 (1995), features The Night of the Generals (1967) among a montage of posters for films he is known to have contributed to as a writer, although, as with Ben-Hur (1959), he is not credited.
• When asked what his favorite film was, he would usually facetiously name an obscure Lana Turner film from 1944, “Marriage Is A Private Affair”, which was also a favorite of his fictitious character Myra Breckinridge. The reason for this was that Vidal knew that Tennessee Williams, a friend of his, had, as an unknown and impoverished writer, contributed some additional dialogue to the film without credit. Williams was always embarrassed whenever anyone mentioned the film.
• He met his long-term partner Howard Austen in 1950. They were together until Austen’s death in November 2003.
• In 1936, as a 10-year-old, he appeared in a Pathé Newsreel landing his father’s light aircraft.
• Lived in Hollywood Hills, California.
• In the early 1970s, a Washington, D.C. television station named the host of their weekly horror movie slot Gore Dival.
• When asked why he was running for governor of California against incumbent governor Jerry Brown, he replied that “the chance to compete against a Zen space cadet is too good to pass up.”.
• Gore is his mother’s maiden surname.
• Uncle of Eric Vidal.
• In 1976, he accepted the Oscar for best writing-original screenplay on behalf of Frank Pierson, who wasn’t present at the Academy Awards ceremony.
• Had diabetes.
• Was nominated for Broadway’s 1960 Tony Award as author of Best Play for “The Best Man”.
• Was upset with the choice of Jerry Lewis as the lead in the movie version of Visit to a Small Planet (1960).
• Was briefly engaged to Joanne Woodward, who broke the engagement to pledge herself to eventual husband Paul Newman. The new couple, who remained friends with Vidal, briefly lived with him in a house in Los Angeles.
• Is uncredited as a screenwriter on Ben-Hur (1959), although producer Sam Zimbalist had promised Vidal and Christopher Fry, who worked on the script independently from Vidal, screen credit. Karl Tunberg, who wrote the original screenplay before many rewrites by Vidal and Fry produced the final shooting script, claimed the credit. Zimbalist died before the movie ended, and thus could not testify at the Writers Guild arbitration hearing. Tunberg won the credit, but failed to win the Oscar. The film had been nominated for 12 Oscars, and won a record 11, a record that has since been tied. The movie’s sole loss was for best writing-screenplay based on material from another medium. The loss is usually attributed to the fallout over the credit dispute, which Vidal made widely known.
• Biography/bibliography in: “Contemporary Authors”. New Revision Series, Vol. 132, pp. 395-409. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2005.
• Uncle of Burr Steers, who is related on his mother’s side to Thomas Jefferson’s infamous vice president Aaron Burr, the subject of Vidal’s best-selling novel “Burr” in 1973.
• Won a National Book Award (1993) for his non-fiction collection “United States: Essays, 1952-1992”.
• Shared a stepfather with the late Jacqueline Kennedy when her mother Janet Norton lee married his former stepfather, Hugh D. Auchinclos.
• He has been cited as a relative of Tennessee senator and Vice President Al Gore (“Gore” was Gore Vidal’s mother’s maiden name). However, Gore Vidal and Al Gore share no common “Gore” ancestors going back to at least the early 1700s.
• His father helped start three different airlines.
• Founded U.S. Peace Party with Benjamin Spock.
• Grandfather Thomas Pryor Gore helped create the state of Oklahoma and was first senator elected to represent the state.
• Born at 10:00am-EST
• Wrote under the pseudonyms or Edgar Box, Katherine Everard and Cameron Kay.
• Unsold script: Wrote the script for a TV movie, “The Magical Monarch of Mo”, based on the novel by L. Frank Baum, which was to star Groucho Marx in the title role. [1960]

Eugene Luther Gore Vidal Filmography

Eugene Luther Gore Vidal Awards