Gore Vidal's life of fiction, fights and fearsome feuds

As the world approaches the centenary of the celebrated novelist, television pundit and all-around man of letters, Martin Chilton recalls his greatest work, most withering putdowns, and chronicles a career marked by sad decline

- Martin Chilton

Gore Vidal said that he hoped to be remembered as "the person who wrote the best sentences of his time". It was a typically vainglorious boast from an author whose finest writing remains overshadowed by his reputation as one of the most waspish and spiteful public figures in recent memory.

Vidal, who was born Eugene Luther Gore Vidal Jr at the West Point Military Academy on 3 October 1925, wrote 25 novels, 14 screenplays, eight stage plays and 26 works of nonfiction, including his majestical essays. He was also a master of the insulting one-liner. Most of the obituaries that followed his death on 31 July 2012 featured his celebrated epigrams, such as: “Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.”

His grandfather was renowned senator TP Gore and his father, Eugene, was director of air commerce under President Franklin D Roosevelt. Vidal loathed his mother Nina, whom he described as a bullying, self-pitying alcoholic. After divorcing Vidal’s father in 1935, she married Hugh D Auchincloss, the stepfather of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Vidal never missed a chance to bring up his connections to the Kennedys. He made few close friends at Philips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and was described as the class “hypocrite” in a poll of fellow students. At 17, he enlisted and served as first mate of an army freight-supply ship, describing his war experiences as “strange, not lovely and cold”.

Army service gave him material for a novel, however, and his life in the public eye began at 22, when he published his World War Two-themed book Williwaw. Two years later, in 1948, he published The City and the Pillar, a novel that dealt openly with queerness. The book was denounced as depraved, and Vidal was, for several years, blacklisted by newspapers, including