Vidal, Gore

The American novelist and essayist Gore Vidal was born at West Point, New York. He was originally christened Eugene Vidal, but in his teens he changed his first name to his maternal grandfather’s surname. Gore Vidal was the only child of the pilot Eugene Luther Vidal and his wife, Nina S. Gore, an actress. He was not close to either. His parents were divorced when Vidal was ten, and although he moved to Virginia to live with his mother, he spent much of his childhood with his grandfather, the learned and entertaining Senator Thomas Gore, in Washington. Vidal attended Los Alamos School, New Mexico in 1939–40 and Phillips Exeter Academy, New Hampshire, in 1940–43, graduating when at the age of seventeen.