Palimpsest (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Gore Vidal
- First Published: 1995
- Type of Work: Memoir
- Time of Work: 1925-1964
- Setting: The United States, Guatemala, Italy, France, and Great Britain
- Principal Characters: Gore Vidal, Thomas Pryor Gore, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy
- Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir
- Subjects: Politics, South or Southerners, Literature, Writing, Hollywood, Guatemala or Guatemalans
- Locales: France, United States, Italy, Great Britain, Guatemala
Literary critics have not looked upon Gore Vidal as a southern writer, despite his argument that they should. “I am southern,” Vidal said in an interview in 1995, and Palimpsest, Vidal’s memoir of his first thirty-nine years, provides evidence that his southern background indeed shaped his writing and politics.
Vidal grew up in the 1920’s and 1930’s in what he has described as “the then southern city of Washington, D.C.” He spent most of his childhood in the home of his maternal grandfather, Senator Thomas Pryor Gore, whom Vidal called “Dah.” Thomas Pryor...
[The entire page is 2050 words long]
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