Indeed, Vidal considered his historical fiction to be not merely literature but ‘a historical force’. Fiction, he thought, ‘can somehow more truthfully and insightfully represent the past’. A writer with an audience has more power than most Congressmen.’ Vidal distrusted historians, believing they ‘write fictionalized versions of the facts, imbued with vested interest’. In a 1969 interview, he said that ‘to be practical, if one wishes to influence events, the Congress is hardly the place to do it. Vidal believed in the power of literature to shape politics and history. Beginning with the ‘Ancient Worlds’ novels, Messiah (1954), Julian (1964), and Creation (1981) – which chart Vidal’s distrust of, but fascination with, powerful religions – Neilson moves into the Narratives of Empire series: ‘the seven novels collectively comprise a thesis about the ways in which American political mythology has been formulated since the War of Independence.’ Power is the subject of Heather Neilson’s excellent Political Animal, an erudite but accessible study of Vidal’s writing that ranges across his non-fiction and drama but centres on the historical fiction. ‘I had the sort of background,’ he said, ‘that made it possible – inevitable – for me to write about men of power from first-hand knowledge.’

But as a writer he retained a fascination with power. Vidal decided against a political career and in doing so ‘fail to complete the “unfinished business” of his grandfather’s life by becoming president of the United States’. He later ran, unsuccessfully, for the Senate in California. In 1962 he turned down the nomination for a New York Senate seat that he might well have won. He lost but put in a good performance in a traditionally Republican district. In 1960, Vidal ran as a Democrat for a New York Congressional seat, endorsed by Eleanor Roosevelt and JFK. While Vidal’s literary career began early (his début novel, Williwaw, was published when he was twenty), a career in politics beckoned.

He was able, when reviewers challenged the historical veracity of his novel Lincoln (1984) to cite his grandfather’s conversations with President Lincoln’s son Robert. As a child, he read to his blind senator grandfather and received a lesson in power. Vidal grew up, as he said in Screening History, ‘backstage’ to the ‘real world of real politics, in a very real Washington’. Jackie took over Vidal’s childhood bedroom at the Auchincloss estate and wore his old shirts riding. Later, Hugh remarried Janet Bouvier, and her daughter – the future Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis – became Vidal’s stepsister. When his mother remarried, to Hugh Auchincloss, Vidal obtained a descendant of Vice President Aaron Burr as a stepfather. His grandfather was a US senator his father served as Franklin D.

American writer Gore Vidal was an intimate of political power.

Aaron burr gore vidal