Gore Vidal
Man on a High Horse
6 min readJul 26, 2020
Gore Vidal wielded a sharp nib and was keen to skewer his rivals with it. He was unapologetic about a mean streak that ran through his erudition. “Beneath my cold exterior,” he warned, “once you break the ice, you find cold water.”
The scion of an upper-crust and politically engaged family, Vidal made an unsuccessful bid as a young man in 1960 for a Democratic congressional seat in New…
