Describing himself as America's "current biographer," Vidal's work has been widely applauded for its depth of satire and biting wit. Named Eugene Luther Vidal upon his birth October 3, 1925 at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York, Vidal grew up in an elite family, the son of an aeronautics instructor and the grandson of Oklahoma Senator Thomas P. Gore. As a child, he attended the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and enlisted in the Army upon his graduation in 1943. World War U proved to be the inspiration for his first novel, Williwaw (1946), a critically well-received look at a military transport ship during the war. His next novel, In a Yellow Wood (1947), was similarly received; it was the publication of The City and the Pillar (1948), however, that gained him his first taste of notoriety (due to the novel's frank depiction of homosexuality). Although he...