Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal was an American novelist, essayist, and screenwriter whose career moved between literary fiction, essays, and Hollywood script work. Born at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, and raised in Washington, D.C., he began writing with the war novel Williwaw, drawn from his wartime duty in the Aleutian Islands. His later books included the historical novel Julian (1964) and works in the Narratives of Empire series, among them Burr (1973) and Lincoln (1984). His essay anthology United States won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1993, and in 2009 he received the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. MGM hired him as a screenwriter in 1956, and he was one of several script doctors on Ben-Hur (1959), although the formal credit went to Karl Tunberg. He also acted, appearing in Roma (1972), Bob Roberts (1992), With Honors (1994), and Gattaca (1997).