Blacklisted by reviewers, Gore Vidal secretly paid his bills writing mysteries as Edgar Box
After his 1948 novel about a young man accepting his homosexuality, Gore Vidal claimed a leading New York Times critic would not review any of his books. So he invented a pen name, Edgar Box, and quietly earned a living from detective novels while plotting the political fiction that later made him famous.
Vidal was born Eugene Louis Vidal on October 3, 1925, at West Point, where his father taught aeronautics. The name shifted several times: a clerical muddle over his father's middle name, then Gore added at a 1939 christening in honour of his maternal grandfather, Senator Thomas Pryor Gore. As a boy Vidal read aloud to the blind senator and guided him around the Senate. At fourteen he dropped his first two names because he wanted something sharp enough for an author or a politician.
Instead of college he joined the army at 17 and ended up first mate on a supply ship in the Aleutian Islands, experience that fed his debut, Williwaw. The City and the Pillar (1948) was dedicated to J. T., whom Vidal decades later named as James Trimble III, a school friend killed at Iwo Jima and, he said, the only person he ever loved. The book provoked outrage; an editor warned him he would never be forgiven for it.
The Edgar Box mysteries of the early 1950s followed a publicist turned private eye, and their sales let Vidal branch into television plays and the stage drama The Best Man (1960). He then turned to history: Julian (1964) reimagined the Roman emperor who tried to restore paganism, and a seven-book cycle called Narratives of Empire, including Burr and Lincoln, tracked American power. Harold Bloom judged his imagination of US politics powerful enough to compel awe, while suggesting historical novels were simply out of fashion with the critics who build canons.
Satire ran alongside. Myra Breckinridge (1968) lampooned Hollywood through a transgender anti-heroine who runs an acting school. Vidal also wanted office himself, standing unsuccessfully as a Democrat for the House in 1960 and the Senate in 1982, and his televised arguments with William F. Buckley Jr. and Norman Mailer sometimes became open feuds. He died on July 31, 2012.
Source: Gore Vidal
