SOURCE: A review of Gore Vidal, in World Literature Today, Vol. 70, No. 1, Winter, 1996, pp. 191-2.

In the following review, LaHood offers a favorable assessment of Gore Vidal.

Gore Vidal has written over twenty novels (starting with Williwaw in 1946), three mystery novels under the pseudonym of Edgar Box, nearly a hundred television scripts, a volume of short stories, two very successful Broadway plays (Visit to a Small Planet, 338 performances; and The Best Man, 520 performances), film scripts, and a collection of essays on literature and politics. He ran for Congress in 1960 in New York; in 1982 he ran in the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate in California. He has debated William F. Buckley and Norman Mailer. In short, he is as prolific and visible a writer as twentieth-century American letters has produced. Yet Jay Parini, who edited the comprehensive and masterful collection of essays on Vidal’s work Gore...