SOURCE: “Star,” in New York Review of Books, April 8, 1993, pp. 24-5.

In the following review, Johnson discusses Vidal's critical reception and public persona, his interest in film as presented in Screening History, and his attack on monotheism in Live from Golgotha.

For his delightful, rather reticent memoir Screening History, Gore Vidal apologizes that he has at last succumbed to “the American writer’s disease, the celebration if not of self, of the facts of one’s own sacred story.” He has “always been able to imagine what it is like to be someone else, but now I begin to wonder what it is like to be me, a figure that keeps cropping up in the lives of others, usually wearing an impenetrable disguise.” In fact he does not really succumb to the American writer’s disease, which is ordinarily to write about how I became Me. This is...