Sent with car and driver to pick up my grandfather at the Capitol and bring him home.

His maternal grandfather, who lived in the Vidal family home, was the venerable, sightless US senator Thomas Pryor Gore (D-Oklahoma), and Vidal recalls the daily ritual of being His father was a high ranking official in the Franklin Roosevelt administration, the director of the Bureau of Air Commerce, the agency known today as the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Gore Vidal was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and was educated in expensive private schools in and around Washington DC. Partisans of the America-as-pure-and-virtuous-beacon-of-liberty-prosperity-and-peace mythology attacked Vidal's novels, of course, but Vidal made it quite clear in a couple of detailed replies to his critics (first published in the New York Review of Books) that he knew at least as much about the history of the periods he depicted in his novels as any of them did - PhD's and members of the professoriate though they might be. They proved that there was, in fact, a substantial market for just such skepticism about the glorious American past. They proved beyond any doubt that the public would not rise up in indignation and smite any author who dared to question the motives and the wisdom of even the most venerated American presidents. One of the forces involved in the recent heating up of the perennial American-history wars was the brilliant critical and popular success, during the 1970s and early 1980s, of the first three books in Gore Vidal's six-volume 1 'American Chronicle' series of historical novels about the United States.

Gore vidal american chronicle series