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Conversations: The Gore Vidal Collection
October 12, 2023 @ 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Free
LIMITED SEATING CAPACITY. PLEASE REGISTER AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!
Guest Speakers: Steven Chester Abbott, official bibliographer for Gore Vidal, and his husband Jim Stephens, will discuss their relationship with Vidal and their extensive collection that is now a part of the George A. Smathers Libraries Special and Area Studies Collections at the University of Florida.
Donated by Steven and Jim in 2023, the Gore Vidal Collection contains over 1,000 books, articles and ephemera relating to Vidal’s publications across seven decades, from working drafts and screenplays to translations of his books and articles into more than 40 languages. This wonderful and versatile group of materials will allow for new areas of research into the pressing political and social issues of Vidal’s times, and will be a great resource for the study of graphic arts, book design, and 20th century publishing for years to come.
Contentious and erudite, Gore Vidal displays a mandarin writing style, a true sense of history, and a firm grasp of American politics. This gives him equal stature in criticism and fiction – and didn’t exactly hurt him in his portrayal of a professional politician in the film Bob Roberts. He is a particularly protean man of letters; the scabrous satirist (Myra Breckenridge) slips easily into the province of the Serious Historical Novelist (Burr, Lincoln). Vidal is a brilliant critic and essayist, and a playwright, too. From Members of the Tribe: Caricatures of Gay Men and Lesbians by Michael Willhoite (Boston, MA: Allyson Publications, 1993).
