'My job, so I did it'

 

“I didn't mean to spend my life writing American history, which should have been taught in the schools, but I saw no alternative but to taking it on myself. I could think of a lot of cheerier things I'd rather be doing than analyzing George Washington and Aaron Burr. But it came to pass, that was my job, so I did it.” – Gore Vidal

 

Vidal was born at the West Point Military Academy on this date in 1925 (his father was an officer and instructor there at the time).   He said he never wanted to be a writer, but he became one of the most well-known and sometimes controversial writers in American history.  And he took on a larger-than-life public role as an intellectual and debater, particularly against conservative writer and spokesman William F. Buckley. 

 

Called “a literary juggernaut” by The Los Angeles Times, his novels and essays are considered "among the most elegant in the English language.”  He wrote 28 nonfiction books, 32 novels, 8 plays, and 16 screenplays and teleplays.  Many were best sellers, especially his gripping historical novels Burr, Lincoln, 1876 and Empire.   And, he won the National Book Award for Nonfiction for the anthology United States: Essays 1952–92.  

 

 In his later years (he died in 2012) he lamented what he termed the lack of good American writers.   “For every Scott Fitzgerald concerned with the precise word and the selection of relevant incident, there are a hundred American writers, many well-regarded, who appear to believe that one word is just as good as another and that everything which occurs to them is worth putting down.”