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About Gore Vidal
"We are honored to have Gore Vidal join this apostolic line of Lowell Lecturers with a talk on 'America First? America Last? America At Last?' It is altogether fitting that we have Mr. Vidal with us here this evening, for he was designated by The Boston Globe as 'our greatest living man of letters,' and he has earned by his writings and his political activities the honorable but somewhat tattered title of 'patriot' as well.
"As a man of letters, Mr. Vidal has ranged across the literary and cultural landscape with numerous novels (classical, Julian; domestic, Lincoln; and satirical, Myra Breckenridge); with books of essays (The Second American, Matters of Fact & Fiction); with Broadway plays (The Best Man, An Evening with Richard Nixon); with motion picture scripts (Ben Hur, Visit to a Small Planet, Suddenly Last Summer); with television scripts (A Sense of Justice, The Death of Billy the Kid); and with a variety of other works in his prolific output. For a quarter-century he has served as the literary and political critic of the New York Review of Books. He has been honored by the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1982 for The Second American Revolution and Other Essays; his citation read: 'The American tradition of independent and curious learning is kept alive in the wit and the great expressiveness of Gore Vidal's criticism.'
"His role as a patriot can be seen from his political activism. In 1960 he ran for Congress from upstate New York; in 1982 he ran in the Democratic primary for the US Senate from California. Although he has never been elected to a political office, he has cared deeply about this country, and his six-novel chronicle of American history (from 1776 to 1954)--comprised of Burr, Lincoln, 1876, Empire, Hollywood, and Washington, DC--attest to his involvement with and commitment to our nation's evolution and traditions.
"His lecture this evening promises to be a significant footnote to his American chronicle. On this Patriots' Day we welcome a distinguished man of letters and patriot, Gore Vidal."
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