Literary Studies

Political Animal: Gore Vidal on Power by Heather Neilson

by James McNamara •

December 2014, no. 367

Political Animal: Gore Vidal on Power

by Heather Neilson

Monash University Publishing, $39.95 pb, 220 pp, 9781921867682

Literary Studies

Political Animal: Gore Vidal on Power by Heather Neilson

by James McNamara •

December 2014, no. 367

American writer Gore Vidal was an intimate of political power. His grandfather was a US senator; his father served as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Director of Air Commerce. When his mother remarried, to Hugh Auchincloss, Vidal obtained a descendant of Vice President Aaron Burr as a stepfather. Later, Hugh remarried Janet Bouvier, and her daughter – the future Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis – became Vidal’s stepsister. Jackie took over Vidal’s childhood bedroom at the Auchincloss estate and wore his old shirts riding. They shared three nephews between them. Gore and Jacqueline’s husband, John F. Kennedy, were close.

James McNamara

James McNamara is an Australian television writer based in Los Angeles. His television work includes comedy and drama writers rooms for the Academy Award-winning See-Saw Films, Matchbox Pictures/NBC Universal, Foxtel, ABC, Porchlight Films, and Endemol Shine, and developing shows for Goalpost Pictures and Playmaker Media/Sony Pictures. McNamara received ABR’s third Ian Potter Foundation Fellowship for his long-form essay, ‘The Golden Age of Television?’ (ABR, April 2015), praised by Clive James as ‘a global contribution to cultural analysis’. McNamara’s essays and criticism have also appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Times Literary Supplement, and The Spectator.

Born in Western Australia in 1982, McNamara received degrees in English and Law from the University of Western Australia, graduated in screenwriting from AFTRS, and holds a doctorate in English from Oxford, where he was a Clarendon Scholar. Before becoming a writer, McNamara was a litigator specialising in international disputes at a top-tier US law firm. He was recently named a BAFTA LA Newcomer.