Dick as an "apostate angel." Such tags have their value, but Vidal has said that he is simply a professional writer, asserting in 1975 that he would like to be remembered as "the person who wrote the best sentences in his time."
Although Vidal styles himself a populist, he grew up in a patrician world that explains a great deal of who and what he is as a writer. His mother, Nina Gore Vidal Auchincloss Olds (1903-1978), was a Washington socialite who traced her American roots to the eighteenth century, and his father, Eugene Vidal (1895-1969), was an aviation expert who taught aeronautics at the United States Military Academy, founded several unsuccessful airlines, and from 1933 to 1937 served President Franklin D. Roosevelt as director of air commerce. Vidal was born at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, but the family lived for the first ten years of his life in the Washington establishment of his maternal grandfather, Sen. Thomas Pryor Gore of Oklahoma (1870-1949). In the senator's parlors, the young Vidal became accustomed to such visitors as Huey Long and Eleanor Roosevelt. After Vidal's parents divorced in 1935, his mother married the wealthy and socially prominent financier Hugh D.
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