RonPrice
New Member
Gore Vidal(b.1925-), who has been called the best all-around American man of letters since Edmund Wilson(1895-1972), began his writing career at nineteen, the year I was born. In 1962, the year I began to travel for the Canadian Baha’i community and begin my own serious literary and academic study, Vidal published his first book of essays entitled: Rocking the Boat. Books of his essays and interviews, novels and memoirs kept appearing as I entered the teaching profession in the 1960s and finally retired in the 1990s. He’s still going, although not as strong at 85 and often in a wheel-chair.-Ron Price with thanks to Harry Kloman, “Gore Vidal’s Essays, Interviews and Memoirs: 1963-Present,” 2005.
He always impressed me with
his remarkable wit and talent:
5 decades of scintillating words
in books & live whenever I saw
him in Australia on TV…He saw
the moral-intellectual hollowness
of American politics at the same I
did—in the early 1960s with those
Kennedys and so he spent the rest
of his life writing books and essays
& a lot of other stuff1---thinking on
paper for a world slowly captured by
electronic distractions. Still, we go on
talking about books and writing them
pretending not to notice that the church
is empty and people have gone over to
attend to other gods in silence or new
words. Surely it’s not that bad Gore?2
1 The Washington Post calls him “the master essayist of our age.” See David Barsamian, “Citizen Gore Vidal,” These Times, 3 November 2008
2 George Scialabba, “Civic Virtues: Gore Vidal’s Selected Essays,” The Nation, 8 October 2008.
Ron Price
3 August 2011
He always impressed me with
his remarkable wit and talent:
5 decades of scintillating words
in books & live whenever I saw
him in Australia on TV…He saw
the moral-intellectual hollowness
of American politics at the same I
did—in the early 1960s with those
Kennedys and so he spent the rest
of his life writing books and essays
& a lot of other stuff1---thinking on
paper for a world slowly captured by
electronic distractions. Still, we go on
talking about books and writing them
pretending not to notice that the church
is empty and people have gone over to
attend to other gods in silence or new
words. Surely it’s not that bad Gore?2
1 The Washington Post calls him “the master essayist of our age.” See David Barsamian, “Citizen Gore Vidal,” These Times, 3 November 2008
2 George Scialabba, “Civic Virtues: Gore Vidal’s Selected Essays,” The Nation, 8 October 2008.
Ron Price
3 August 2011
