Gore Vidal is Dead
When I read Anais Nin's diary from 1944-1947, I was rather surprised to discover that the main narrative concerned her friendship with Gore Vidal (who would later mock the shit out of her in Myra Breckenridge) and how she saw him as a sensitive young artist who was eager to escape his rather sinister family. Immediately, I thought that either Anais
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He also had affection for Edgar Rice Burroughs, allowing that ERB, when he was on his game, could write extremely effective, engrossing and entertaining action scenes (something that Vidal freely admitted that he could not do).
If Vidal mercilessly mocked the likes of Hemingway, Updike, Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, Henry Miller, Doris Lessing, and, yes, Anaïs Nin -- well, I have no real problem with that, as my encounters with their work (saving only Lessing, whom I've not read yet) tend to give credence to his ill opinion of it.
I also love that he called Dumas père "dull"; after slogging through the Oxford World's Classics edition of The Count of Monte Cristo -- and learning that there were two whole chapters of it that have never been translated into English -- I am more than comfortable to regard him as a more than usually trustworthy literary critic; unlike, say, Stephen King or Harlan Ellison.
If you don't feel like diving into his novels of American history (I'd say that Burr, Lincoln, and Empire are the best; the only one I haven't read yet is the first published/chronologically last in the Narratives of Empire series, Washington, D.C.), I'd recommend the unabridged version of Creation (published in 2002): the protagonist meets Socrates, Zoroaster (who is his grandpa), Siddhartha Gautama, Mahavira, Lao Tsu, and Confucius.
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I will read Burr, but I think I already read Empire - not sure, is that the one where he blamed FDR for Pearl Harbor as if it was a massive conspiracy?
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Empire deals with McKinley deciding to take up the "white man's burden" by reneging on promises to Filipino insurgents and ganking the Philippines for the U.S.'s sake after chasing the Spanish out (and also grabbing Hawai'i, incidentally, at the urgings of the Dole family). In the background are the counterpoints of Theodore Roosevelt and William Randolph Hearst (the book concludes with a verbal duel between the two; Vidal admitted that this scene was fictionalized, as they apparently never met more than in passing in real life), and the Greek chorus of Henry James and Henry Adams (great-grandson of John and grandson of John Quincy).
Robert E. Howard was a better writer than ERB, but REH had cultural imperialist issues of his own: he thought that blacks were superior to whites because they were less "civilized," more "savage." That said, ERB could churn out effective potboilers when he put his mind to it (I'd cite Tarzan of the Apes and the first three John Carter books as exemplars of his best work), and actually pay attention to the internal consistency of his own milieu. As he became richer and richer, continuity or even breakneck pace mattered less and less to him; then again, ERB is far from being the only guilty party in that regard. (ERB was also evidently squeamish about human sexuality -- specifically, human reproduction -- and rather slavish in his regard for royalty [see A Fighting Man of Mars]. There is also more than a whiff of fascist cheerleading in his works, particularly in the later Venus series; but, again, he is far from alone in that regard, and Norman Spinrad brilliantly demonstrated what a slippery slope it was from pulp sci-fi to full-bore Nazism in The Iron Dream.)
I don't believe that Vidal was a conspiracy theorist -- he called himself a "conspiracy analyst" in his later years -- but I agree that he became increasingly sour, bilious, and unpleasant as he aged (again, he wasn't the first person to do so, and I very much doubt that he'll be the last); he tended to sabotage the good points that he was trying to make (why the rush to execute Timothy McVeigh? was 9/11 really such a bolt from the blue? was Pearl Harbor?), so that many people discarded everything that he said. He notably subscribed to the "lone gunman" explanation of who shot JFK, largely because of the conduct of RFK after Jack's death; he didn't consider until relatively late in his life that Bobby was utterly cowed by the murder of his brother. Bobby did apparently have a "road to Damascus" moment after 1963, evincing something of a 180-degree personality change.
Hitchens had his own set of problems, as much as I admired a lot of his writing; IIRC, he and Vidal faced roughly equivalent charges of anti-Semitism. Still, of the dust-ups between Vidal and Norman Podhoretz that I've heard of, I'll back Vidal.
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