C.E. Morgan: ‘Light in August’ is Faulkner’s Great American Novel

The Daily Beast

Novelist C.E. Morgan says ‘Light in August,’ newly reissued this month, is Faulkner’s claim to the Great American Novel. It’s even more central to the author’s canon than ‘Sound and the Fury’ or ‘As I Lay Dying,’ because of its one ineradicably American concern—race.

In recent decades, the Great American Novel has come under attack. Once a prize expectation of the reading public and the aspiration of the American literary mind, the very idea of the Great American Novel now seems hopelessly naïve and unevolved and, like any fashion that’s become passé, a bit of an embarrassment. It may even be a misstatement to refer to the notion as under attack; it’s more like a fl y that’s been unceremoniously swatted away by the dismissive hand of literary discourse. The Great American Novel has alternately been described as a fantasy of the philologist’s cataloging mind, a tattered remnant of hierarchical thinking from a time when the notion of greatness itself went unquestioned, or an elusive siren that’s led many a novelist to wreck on the shores of their own oversized ambition. Perhaps most enduringly, in the great push to open the canon—that equally outdated thing!—to women, the Great American Novel has been castigated as a masculinist invention, one designed to celebrate the literary breadth and depth of the male mind at the expense of its female counterpart. Though, instead of shooting down great books written by men like so many clay pigeons, we might simply state the obvious: female subjugation and lack of opportunity have been cornerstones of world history and, there- fore, of literary history, and, as such, necessarily enabled male accomplishment. Altogether, the judgment seems nearly unanimous: the very (spurious) notion of the Great American Novel is either soon to be superannuated; or, it’s a literary dinosaur we can now confidently—even proudly—name as fully extinct. Amen.

Or perhaps not. Since it’s inarguable that literary excellence may come in many forms, from the so-called "small" domestic novel (small only to small intellects, we might object) to the mystery to the historical epic to the bildungsroman, etc., might there be a category for a text that, while intellectually acute, stylistically idiosyncratic, and emotionally profound like any other great novel, also explores an aspect of American life with such unmistakable brilliance and force that we can barely keep from saying that this—this—is not just a great novel, but a Great American Novel? In other words, is a novel like Moby-Dick simply an excellent book, or does it signify a reality both universal and distinctly—perhaps even incontrovertibly—at the heart of the collective American experience, if such a thing can be said to exist? Or what of the sprawling and highly politicized Uncle Tom’s Cabin, easily the most influential piece of fiction in American history, made so by one writer’s genius for capturing the nation’s moral anxiety? What of Invisible Man, with its chaotic portrait of the midcentury black consciousness, a book that brilliantly encapsulated the upheavals of our last century? Or Blood Meridian, a towering achievement of American history wedded to aestheticization? Or Infinite Jest? Or Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? Or Light in August?

　

If these books are indeed Great American Novels—a distinct category, a variant of excellence—they are generally big in every way. Rarely neat and carefully ordered, they are neither quickly read nor readily comprehended in their full complexity. They don’t lend themselves to facile exegesis. Instead, they often manifest as overabundant, and just as an over- rich meal can overwhelm or even sicken the stomach, so can these novels overwhelm even the most generous reader: they are intellectually ambitious but imperfect, expansive in their vision, often shocking with their unwelcome insights and the intensity of their language. These novels are storehouses of information regarding the human in a specifically American context, but not in the fulsomely empty manner of so many contemporary novels, where linguistic abundance is too often a reflection of authorial egotism while purporting to be a commentary on culture. In many great novels, the multifarious content necessitates a certain largesse of form. And these novels bear something else in common, something intangible and less easily identifiable than a shared culture: a wildness, even madness, which is displayed when a magisterial creative force finally finds a palette broad enough for its outpourings. As a result, these works can seem almost unmanageable. The critic Harold Bloom famously required multiple readings to make it through the violence of Blood Meridian. And little wonder that a novel of mad desperation such as Moby-Dick might wait seventy years for an appreciative audience; many of Melville’s critics considered this masterwork—perhaps the greatest American novel yet written—to be the scribblings of an insane man. Of course, it’s become a trope of literary biography that great writers must often wait for their readership. Faulkner himself enjoyed little popularity and almost no sales until he published Sanctuary, his sixth novel. When The Portable Faulkner was released in 1946, many of his works were out of print. In great counter- distinction to his current reputation as one of the finest novelists and prose stylists of the twentieth century, he toiled much of his life in obscurity.

　

　

Light in August, published in 1932, is Faulkner’s Great American Novel. It was the seventh of what would be 19 novels, an output that was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1949 and that, to borrow a hackneyed but apt phrase, represents nothing less than an embarrassment of riches. A writer of prodigious powers, Faulkner bequeathed to readers a rich fictional panoply of complex characters, incisive social commentary, formal ingenuity, and metaphorical depth. His oeuvre displays an unsentimental compassion, a tragedian’s unblinking vision, and an almost preternatural insight into human motivation and desire. He left behind two highly influential masterpieces of modernist fiction: The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, works that, along with other modernist texts, radically altered conceptions of narrative linearity and the formal depiction of consciousness. Absalom, Absalom!, often mentioned in the same breath, is celebrated by many as his greatest, most fully realized novel, one of tremendous breadth and a radical consistency of aesthetics. But it is the less mannered Light in August, sometimes overlooked in discussions of his more overtly modernist works, that draws all of Faulkner’s familiar preoccupations—determinism vs. free will, the partially Reconstructed South, religiosity, the draw of female sexuality, and the power of the living past—around one overriding, ineradicably American concern: race.

　

Light in August is the story of Joe Christmas, a man of indeterminate race who believes himself to be black despite appearing white. Because the exact details of his birth are lost to history and retold vaguely through unreliable narrators, we know only slightly more than Christmas does: he might be part black, he might be Mexican, he might be white. This unknowing, this lack of definition, forms the central irony of the book and mirrors perfectly the central irony of the American experience: we are a nation built upon, devoted to, and defined by constructed racial categories that do not—scientifically speaking—exist. These highly mutable categories were designed to establish clear demarcations between populations, but the supposed distinctions are for the most part superficial and illusory. Illusion, rendered into a kind of fact by action, has provided us with centuries of meaning.

　

So a story prefigures Light in August, just as an ancestor precedes a descendant. It’s a story that begins with the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in the New World in 15021, a story that continues with the importation into the Americas of between 11 and 15 million captives via the Middle Passage, the enslavement of their descendants, the denial of all essential human rights, then the abandonment of an entire people after sudden emancipation, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and other terror groups, the denial of suffrage, and the long struggle through the twentieth century toward a recognizable equality in social, educational, and political spheres. The story is long and violent and composed of so many competing strands that our national history has fairly begged for unifying narratives on race. That so many of our greatest American books have attended to this complicated ethnological history seems right, even necessary, and causes the assertions of new historicism to ring true: our peculiar history not only laid the groundwork for our literature, but demanded it. A book like Light in August is an answer to a call.

　

It draws all of Faulkner’s familiar preoccupations—determinism vs. free will, the partially Reconstructed South, religiosity, the draw of female sexuality, and the power of the living past—around one overriding, ineradicably American concern: race.

　

Though the opening pages concern the intrepid Lena Grove, the novel belongs to Joe Christmas, and his narrative begins with a conflagration: a local house is burning to the ground. As the reader soon learns, the outsider Christmas has both set the house afire and murdered its reclusive resident, Joanna Burden. We are quickly introduced to a broad cast of characters including the somewhat pitiable Byron Bunch; the Reverend Gail Hightower, haunted by his family’s Confederate past; and the elusive, impenetrable Christmas. These characters—some picaresque, some disturbing or tragic, some like Greek furies refashioned over skin and bone in the South—are not bound so much by family ties as in so many Faulkner novels, but by the social realities created by race in the South.

　

Once we have seen the criminal work of the adult Joe Christmas, the reader is ushered back in time to see him as a youth, to witness how—as Wordsworth put it—"the child is father of the man." An orphan, Christmas has been abandoned on the doorstep of a home for white children due to his supposed blackness. Bearing unintentional witness to a nurse’s sexual peccadilloes, which he is far too young to understand, his racial status is then made public and he is soon placed for adoption with a white couple. Thus the stage is set for the twice- uprooted young boy to confl ate his alienation, loss, and physical instability with licentious female sexuality and his alleged racial identity.

　

But the child soon discovers this new home is no haven. He is introduced to the stiff American cocktail of religion and violence. In a familiar pattern of indoctrination, his adoptive father strives to mold the boy to the couple’s Episcopalianism, characterized in this case by stricture, self- denial, and brutality. Mirroring a social reality where blackness is conflated animalism, the text reveals again and again how Christmas is beaten like an animal; thus the rod spoils the child and he learns that his "flesh is a cage." His nascent sexuality, struggling to develop alongside this cruelty, becomes fused with violence, and his first erotic encounter with a female is curtailed by an eruption of long suppressed fury. Once an abandoned child, he is now quickly transforming into a violent young adult. If we can think of Christmas as a gun, then female sexuality and religion together form his trigger.

　

By the time Christmas wanders into Yoknapatawpha County at the age of 33, his Christological year, his past is littered with violent, failed relationships and years of itinerancy, during which he has moved like a shadow around the country, finding no respite in the North or the South. When he arrives at the Burden house, "a place of some pretensions," inhabited by the sole surviving member of a long line of race activists, he enters as a thief, stealing his dinner. When Joanna Burden discovers him in her family home, she is cold, unafraid, and wholly unlike any woman he has known. In due course, they become lovers.

　

The chapters depicting their highly charged relationship constitute the core of the novel. Joanna, whose father and brother were murdered for supporting African- American suffrage, has lived for years in seclusion and celibacy. But now her frigid stoicism quickly devolves into a kind of nymphomania. Though she orchestrates their sexually transgressive trysts, Christmas willingly acts the part of violent lover. But he is a lover only and never to be confused with a husband: he takes up residence in one of the old slave cabins. When the temperature of their erotic heat inevitably cools, Joanna’s madness becomes evident and she gradually retreats into celibacy, this time augmented by austere religiosity, that old specter returned to haunt Christmas’s life once again. This shift from eroticism to fanaticism should not be mistaken for a transmutation, but a pendulum swinging between different but frightfully complementary extremes. We can recognize this in our national character, which history has revealed to us again and again: religious fundamentalism always shows its shadow, in licentiousness and sexual excess. An intolerance and terror of the latter necessitates the initial psychic retreat to the former.

　

As the narrative advances inexorably toward the crime, these two characters shift to occupy polarities. Joanna, now sexually frigid, performs a white form of abuse: without regard for his individuality, she attempts to "uplift" Joe Christmas and mold him into a "good Negro"; no longer recognizing his full humanity, she is blinded by a preoccupation with the general and can no longer recognize his particularity. In response, the enraged Christmas becomes what society has determined he shall become: the immoral, murderous, animalistic black man. When Joanna demands he pray with her and even pulls a gun from her robe, he murders her in her bedroom. In an especially gruesome act, he almost severs her head. The decapitation makes manifest the brutal psychic divides suffered by both Joanna and Joe, whose nearly identical names express their fundamental similarity: her self- abnegating religiosity housed uncomfortably in a nymphomaniacal body, and his forced relegation to a black body, a state that in America meant to be sexualized, utilized, demonized, and denied his intellectual potential. When he kills her, he is both punishing her and all previous white transgressors against his humanity, and he’s killing his determined self.

　

The murder complete, he then pursues his own early death, an event that has felt textually inevitable. In scenes that call to mind the flight of slaves out of the antebellum South, Christmas runs from the Burden house, but he doesn’t go very far. In fact, he doesn’t even leave the county and is captured in a neighboring town. Now the town of Jefferson is out to lynch him, and his death is surely only a matter of time. Christmas executes another escape, but it’s an almost half- hearted attempt at freedom, as if he were chasing an American chimera that he had not ever been foolish enough to really believe in.

　

He finds himself at the Reverend Hightower’s house in one final and futile attempt to fi nd in religion what ought to be there—a haven for the suffering and the downtrodden. But when Hightower attempts to produce a false alibi for Christmas, which might render him innocent in the town’s eyes, it is too little too late. Hightower, like many of Faulkner’s characters, has spent his life living in the past, in the Old South of his forefathers; his life was forestalled before he was even born, and his ancestors are more alive than he is. As a result, his religion is now ineffectual and he is spiritually impotent. He cannot save Christmas, who is killed in the kitchen of his home, the one place where—for so many generations—black slaves or servants could reliably be found in white homes.

　

In one sickening final detail, Joe Christmas is castrated even before he is dead, his blood soaking his attackers. Still conscious, Christmas witnesses this final indignity, forced upon him by a culture that so hates and fears black male sexuality that it literally strives to carve it out of the black body. The blood, which jets from Christmas’s violated body, is not his alone; it is collective.

　

In these final moments of Joe Christmas’s life, the novel presses on the reader with almost unbearable force; the fear is palpable, the violence sickening, and the message clear. The novel’s readers, both black and white, are asked to look into a reflecting pool that reveals both themselves and the America they have inherited. They are never told to change by a severe didacticism. Rather, they are prompted to change by something much more powerful: their own emotional response.

　

The novel’s emotional immediacy, moral gravity, and linguistic power remain undiminished after eighty years, all contributing to its enormous influence. The impact has rippled down through three generations, leaving marks on books as diverse as Gilead, Outer Dark, Invisible Man, and Beloved, proving, as Cormac McCarthy once said: "The ugly fact is books are made out of books. … The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written." This long line of influence may, in fact, become the determining factor of a particular kind of greatness in American letters; a book like Light in August becomes so simultaneously reflective of and embedded in the American literary consciousness that the two begin to resemble each other and, indeed, become each other. Great American Novels become both an indispensable part of understanding aspects of the American experience and a part of the American experience itself. One reads Huck Finn to understand America, and when one strives to understand America, one reads Huck Finn. As with Huck Finn, so with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, so with Invisible Man, and so with Light in August.

　

Yet each generation offers up only so many great writers. Their outpourings may be few and far between and, in the silence, we hear conflicting reports that while the world is increasingly globalized, our individual consciousness is splintered by strange new media, rendering us unable to believe in greatness, recognize it, or even define it. Our country is apparently now too diverse and divided to be harnessed by one identity or one great book, as if the country weren’t always—even in its colonial days—a mad constellation of differences unified just barely by a handful of common concerns. In this present social reality, can the Great American Novel survive? Or has it been killed by the very thing it seeks to explore, the Great American Experiment? If it is alive, is it even relevant or, to borrow a phrase from Eliot, is it a patient "etherized upon a table"? It’s easy to lose hope. In a literary landscape of wildly praised yet mediocre novels, even the most careful readers might toss up their hands in exasperation. At any given time, pleasant but callow books rule the day and most certainly the bestseller lists. For all of our chatter about innovation and harried forward motion, when it comes to art, our postmillennial culture too often celebrates the torpid and the trite. A book like Light in August—which relentlessly explores the full complexity of the human and plunges us into the tangled thick of the language, both without regard for consequences— appears so rarely that its near cousin, the good but not great novel, threatens to supplant it entirely and elide the necessary distinction. Perhaps in a culture hell-bent on instant gratification (and its literary manifestation, the easily digested book), greatness won’t survive its own rarity.

　

Yet novelists—those dogged practitioners of a supposedly dying art—keep coming. And each one emerges, not fully formed from the forehead of Zeus, but as an idiosyncratic, ever inchoate consciousness flooded by the joys and pains of lived experience, bolstered by a strong native intelligence and empathy, by an insatiable drive for communication, by the prepotent great books, and by a cultural force as unavoidable as it is irreducible: our living history. Faulkner’s most famous quote is inescapable here: "The past is never dead. It’s not even past." Likewise, the Great American Novel isn’t dead and cannot die because, as long as young writers read Invisible Man or Uncle Tom’s Cabin, they will—by dint of their nature and the innervating effect of greatness itself—feel compelled to respond both to the book and to its foundational, historical causes. The agony of a character like Joe Christmas is simultaneously so culturally grounded and so brilliantly depicted that it demands a response from an artist, just as history demanded the art in the fi rst place. The books of our best writers live on, in part, because of this artistic response, a process that establishes the initial text as ever more foundational and canonical. In this way, previous generations refuse to die; they’re always speaking on the page. "People are an indestructible element," is how Faulkner expressed it, but he might as well have said books, because books are the physical embodiment of human consciousness. For the artist encountering the masterpieces of human consciousness, the process is almost biological: books become the bones of writers, their hair, their skin, their blood, their organs. The artist responds as passionately to art as a lover responds to a kiss. The drive to create is no less powerful than the need to eat or reproduce. For the artist it is a biological imperative.

　

So is the Great American Novel dead? Well, our country isn’t dead. And furthermore, tragedy isn’t dead. Hilarity isn’t dead, not even wounded. Nor is birth, marriage, sex, crime, hate, madness, prayer, nor our impossibly powerful language, with all its various and productive offshoots—nor, God ever forbid it, our living inheritance, which is American history itself. So, with all the optimism that, as Americans, has alternately been our folly, our weapon, and our hope, I say: there’s life in us yet. There are more great, distinctly American novels yet to come.

C.E. Morgan is the author of All the Living. She is a resident of Kentucky.

New Fossils Indicate Early Branching of Human Family Tree

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD NY TIMES

Fossil by fossil, scientists over the last 40 years have suspected that their models for the more immediate human family tree — the single trunk, straight as a Ponderosa pine, up from Homo habilis to Homo erectus to Homo sapiens — were oversimplified. The day for that serious revision may be at hand.

The discovery of three new fossil specimens, announced Wednesday, is the most compelling evidence yet for multiple lines of evolution in our own genus, Homo, scientists said. The fossils showed that there were at least two contemporary Homo species, in addition to Homo erectus, living in East Africa as early as two million years ago.

Uncovered from sandstone at Koobi Fora, badlands near Lake Turkana in Kenya, the specimens included a well-preserved skull of a late juvenile with a relatively large braincase and a long, flat face, which has been designated KNM-ER 62000 (62000 for short). It bears a striking resemblance to the enigmatic cranium known as 1470, the center of debate over multiple lineages since its discovery in the same area in 1972.

If the 62000 skull showed that 1470 was not a single odd individual, the other two specimens seemed to provide a vital piece of evidence that had been missing. The specimen 1470 had no mandible, or lower jaw. The new finds included an almost complete lower jaw (60000) — considered to be the most complete mandible of an early Homo yet found — and a part of another lower jaw (62000).

The fossils were collected between 2007 and 2009 by a team led by Meave and Louise Leakey, the mother-and-daughter paleoanthropologists of the Koobi Fora Research Project and members of the famous African fossil-hunting family. Dr. Meave Leakey is the wife of Richard Leakey, a son of Louis and Mary Leakey, who produced the early evidence supporting Africa’s central place in early human origins. Mr. Leakey divides his time between Stony Brook University on Long Island, where he is a professor of anthropology, and the Turkana Basin Institute in Kenya.

After looking "long and hard" for fossils to confirm the intriguing features of 1470’s face and show what its teeth and lower jaw were like, Dr. Meave Leakey said this week, "At last we have some answers."

The real crux of matter, said Susan C. Antón of New York University, a member of the team, is how the discovery shapes the interpretation of 1470’s place in the early world of Homo. "These fossils are anatomically like 1470, and we now have some teeth," she said. "We are more certain that 1470 was not a one-off, and not everything 1470 is big."

In their first formal report, Dr. Leakey and her colleagues wrote in the journal Nature, "These three specimens will greatly aid the reassessment of the systematics and early radiation of the genus Homo."

They, however, chose not to assign the fossils to any existing or new species until more analysis is conducted on contemporary hominids. The 1470 specimen was two million years old; the new face and fragmentary jaw are 1.9 million to 1.95 million years old; the better-preserved lower jaw is younger still, at 1.83 million years old.

Fred Spoor, a member of the discovery team who directed the laboratory analysis, said in a news teleconference that the research showed clearly that "human evolution is not this straight line it was once thought to be." Instead, East Africa, he said, "was quite a crowded place, with multiple species" with presumably different diets.

Dr. Spoor is a paleoanthropologist at University College London and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. The lab work was supported by the institute. The fieldwork was financed by the National Geographic Society, and the dating of the fossils, mainly by Craig S. Feibel of Rutgers University, was supported by the Leakey Foundation.

Although a few specialists in human origins questioned whether the still sparse evidence was sufficient to back the new conclusions, Ian Tattersall of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, who was not involved in the new discovery, concluded, "This new material certainly substantiates the idea, long gathering ground, that multiple lineages of early Homo are present in the record at Koobi Fora."

Dr. Tattersall continued, "And it supports the view that the early history of Homo involved vigorous experimentation with the biological and behavioral potential of the new genus, instead of a slow process of refinement in a central lineage."

Bernard Wood of George Washington University, who has studied the early Homo fossil record, wrote in a companion article in Nature, "In a nutshell, the anatomy of the specimens supports the hypothesis of multiple early Homo species."

Dr. Wood then weighed the pros and cons of placing the new fossils with the species H. habilis, first discovered in 1964, or a separate and controversial parallel species known as H. rudolfensis, to which 1470 has often been tentatively assigned. H. erectus emerged around the same time, joining the other two species in Africa.

Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum of London, who had no part in the research, agreed that it looked as if the new discoveries "confirm the distinctiveness of 1470" and "therefore confirm the existence of a distinctive kind of early human around 1.8 to 2.0 million years ago." But he noted that "there remain many uncertainties" about the 1470 fossil "and whether it might still be just a large specimen of Homo habilis."

Another problem, Dr. Stringer said, is that in the last three decades, as the number of fossils attributed to habilis has grown, it has become unclear how to define what is and is not a member of that Homo species. Determining if the new fossils belong to rudolfensis or habilis, he said, "would depend on ongoing comparisons with the original fossil assemblage" at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, where the first and many other habilis and contemporary specimens have been excavated.

An assessment of recent finds at Olduvai as well as the 1470 fossil, by Ronald J. Clarke of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, was published recently in a special issue of The Journal of Human Evolution.

"So where do we go from here?" Dr. Wood asked in his commentary. "More work needs to be done using the faces and lower jaws of modern humans and great apes to check how different the shapes and the palate can be among individuals in living species."

All in all, the state of hominin affairs that paleoanthropologists are left with is neatly summed up in the title of Dr. Wood’s article, "Facing Up to Complexity." He concluded with the prediction that "by 2064, 100 years after Leakey and colleagues’ description of H. habilis, researchers will view our current hypotheses about this phase of human evolution as remarkably simplistic."

               

Gore Vidal

Jay Parini London Guardian

 

 

He liked to present himself as an insider. (Photograph: AP)

Gore Vidal, the American writer, media pundit, controversialist and politician manqué, who has died aged 86, was celebrated both for his caustic wit and his mandarin poise. His public career spanned seven decades and included 25 novels, numerous collections of essays on literature and politics, a volume of short stories, five Broadway plays, dozens of television plays and film scripts, and even three mystery novels written under the pseudonym Edgar Box. After 9/11 and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, he returned to centre stage with a series of blistering pamphlets and public pronouncements that led many, including his former friend Christopher Hitchens, to pounce on him. But Vidal never looked back.

Despite his prolific output as a novelist and playwright, many critics considered Vidal's witty and acerbic essays his best work. Often published first in such journals as the New York Review of Books or the Times Literary Supplement, they were collected at regular intervals between the novels. In 1993, his collected essays, United States: Essays, 1951-91, received the National Book award. As Stephen Spender wrote in a review, "Vidal's essays celebrate the triumphs of private values over the public ones of power. They represent the drama of the private face perpetually laughing at, and through, the public one. At the same time, their seriousness lies very largely in his grasp of the conditions and characteristics which make up the public world." Vidal liked to present himself as an insider – a man who understood the world and how it worked. This knowing quality, registered in the tone of his prose, permeates the essays. Their edge and vitality derive from his complete mastery of the scene he described, whether ridiculing Ronald Reagan as "a triumph of the embalmer's art", reassessing the presidency of John F Kennedy, outlining the theory of the French "new novel" or reconsidering the importance of Montaigne or Somerset Maugham.

Vidal's critics disparaged his tendency to formulate an aphorism rather than to argue, finding in his work an underlying note of contempt for those who did not agree with him. His fans, on the other hand, delighted in his unflagging wit, idiosyncratic learning and elegant style.

Probably no American writer since Ernest Hemingway lived his life so much in the public eye. His father was Eugene Vidal, Franklin Roosevelt's director of air commerce from 1933 to 1937. His maternal grandfather was the senator Thomas Gore, a commanding figure in Washington politics for many decades. His mother, Nina Gore Vidal, divorced his father in 1935, then married the financier Hugh D Auchincloss, who in turn divorced her and married Jacqueline Kennedy's mother, thus establishing a connection between Vidal and the Kennedy clan that persisted through the presidency of John F Kennedy. Vidal's unflattering view of the Bouvier sisters was registered in Two Sisters (1970).

In 1940, he entered the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, where he was an indifferent student. After leaving in 1943, he joined the Army Transportation Corps as an officer, whereupon he was sent to the Aleutian Islands. In December 1944 he began his first novel, Williwaw. Suffering a bad case of frostbite, Vidal was invalided back to the US, where he finished the novel in less than a year. Williwaw focused on a rivalry between two maritime officers; in style it owed something to Hemingway and Stephen Crane. For a writer barely out of his teens when it was published, in 1946, the book was an unusual achievement. He was compared favourably to the best writers of the generation, including Norman Mailer, Truman Capote and Saul Bellow.

Vidal worked briefly in publishing in New York, but the critical success of Williwaw emboldened him, and he decided to live by his pen. Having little money, he moved to Guatemala, where he shared a house with Anaïs Nin, who wrote a good deal about him (some of it not very complimentary) in her diaries.

By any standard, the postwar years were amazingly productive for Vidal, who published eight novels between 1946 and 1954, including The City and the Pillar (1948), an explicitly gay novel that challenged the homophobia he believed was ingrained in American culture. It became a bestseller, but the consequences were severe, and Vidal's literary career nearly ground to a premature halt. His next five novels were largely dismissed by the mainstream press at the time, and one can feel the hostility in the reviews. The reaction of John W Aldridge was typical: "His writing after Williwaw is one long record of stylistic breakdown and spiritual exhaustion. It is confused and fragmentary, pulled in every direction by the shifting winds of impressionism. It is always reacting, always feeling and seeing; but it never signifies because it never believes."

After a period of wandering in Europe with his friend Tennessee Williams (in Paris he was greeted by André Gide as a prophet of the sexual revolution), Vidal settled along the Hudson River Valley. There, in 1950, he bought Edgewater, an impressive Greek revival mansion. He met his lifelong companion, Howard Austen, around this time. They lived together for 53 years, until Austen died in 2003.

Always intent on living well, Vidal needed a good deal more money than his fiction attracted. Not surprisingly, he turned to television, Hollywood and Broadway to expand his income. "I am not at heart a playwright," he explained at the time, with typical candour. "I am a novelist turned temporary adventurer; and I chose to write television, movies, and plays for much the same reason that Henry Morgan selected the Spanish Main for his peculiar – and not dissimilar – sphere of operations."

His finest moment in the theatre was Visit to a Small Planet (1957), a play that ran for more than 300 performances on Broadway. This satire about a visitor from outer space who arrives in Virginia with the hope of starting a third world war recalls Wilde and Shaw, though it reverberates with Vidal's own unmistakable tone. The Best Man, a political play, was a hit in 1960, and was made into a widely acclaimed film starring Henry Fonda with a script by Vidal in 1964. It has been successfully revived many times, including in 2012 on Broadway.

Vidal's screenwriting assignments included a vivid adaptation of Williams's Suddenly, Last Summer, in 1959. He also revised the final script of Ben-Hur (1959) for William Wyler, although he did not receive a screen credit. To the end, he kept a hand in screenwriting and, in his last decade, played minor parts in several films, most notably as a senator in Bob Roberts (1992).

Having harboured political ambitions since adolescence, Vidal tossed his hat in the ring in 1960, running for Congress as a Democrat in New York's traditionally Republican 29th District. He spoke out for the recognition of communist China, limiting the Pentagon's budget and increasing federal aid to education. Not surprisingly, he lost the election, though he made a respectable showing at the polls. In 1982, he ran in the Democratic primary for the US Senate in California, although he was beaten for the nomination by Jerry Brown.

Vidal's politics were always on the left side of the spectrum, and he derided the two-party system in his native land, arguing in the 1970s: "There is only one party in the United States, the Property party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt – until recently … and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties."

Soon after losing his first election, Vidal moved to Italy, where he would spend the bulk of each year until 2003, when he moved permanently to a large home in the Hollywood Hills after Austen's death. In Rome, where for several decades he kept an apartment overlooking the Largo Argentina, he wrote Julian (1964), a bestselling novel about the enigmatic Roman emperor who rejected Christianity and embraced paganism. This novel brought together preoccupations that had been present in his fiction from the beginning, such as the perceived hypocrisy of Christianity and a fascination with power. Vidal's attraction to the ancient world yielded another popular novel, Creation, in 1981.

The late 1960s were a heady time for Vidal, who feuded with William F Buckley on American television during the Chicago presidential convention of 1968 – those debates are enshrined in the memory of most Americans of a certain age. That same year, he lifted his satire to a new level of outrageousness with Myra Breckinridge. His narrator, Myra, was formerly (before a sex change) Myron, nephew of Buck Loner, a retired horse-opera star. A proto-feminist, Myra opens the novel boldly: "I am Myra Breckinridge whom no man will ever possess."

Of all his works, it is his sequence of novels on American history that may be his most lasting achievement. Vidal, however, had nothing like a sequence in mind when he published Washington, DC (1967), a fairly conventional novel about politics during the era of FDR. While there is much to admire in the book, nobody could have foreseen how Vidal's American chronicle would unfold. Burr, the next to appear (in 1973), brings into play virtually all the author's various talents. It was finished about the time Vidal moved from Rome to Ravello, where he purchased La Rondinaia, a palatial villa perched on a cliffside overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. The narrative voice in Burr belongs to Charlie Schuyler, a young law clerk and journalist who works for Aaron Burr, the man who killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel in 1804 and who, two years later, initiated a secessionist conspiracy that challenged the assumptions of America's founding fathers, all of whom Burr knew well.

Next came 1876 (published in 1976), a novel that continued the story of Schuyler, who returns to New York on the eve of America's centennial year. It draws a portrait of the gilded age with an acid pen and an eye for the authentic, and telling, detail. Schuyler is the panoptical observer, taking in everything from a discreet distance. He sees, but is rarely seen – the ideal Vidalian narrator. Vidal's readership had expanded after Julian, but Lincoln (1984) was a huge bestseller. The very weight of the historical material pushed the author to one side (and it is to Vidal's credit that he knew enough to stay in the background). Joyce Carol Oates suggested that Lincoln was "not so much an imaginative reconstruction of an era as an intelligent, lucid and highly informative transcript of it, never less than workmanlike in its blocking out of scenes and often extremely compelling. No verbal pyrotechnics here, nothing to challenge a conservative aesthetics biased against the house of fiction itself. By subordinating the usual role of the novelist to the role of historian-biographer, Mr Vidal acknowledges his faith in the high worth of his material." The last three novels in the series – Empire (1987), Hollywood (1990) and The Golden Age (2000) – in many ways constitute one novel appearing in three installments. Vidal was uncanny in the way he linked his heroes and heroines to history and to each other. As Richard Poirer noted in a review of Empire: "Vidal manages inextricably to mix the fictive and the historical, the social and the legendary. These elements are so fused in his style that none can be differentiated from the others. All partake of the same issues of inheritance, legitimacy, rivalry, deception, and ambition." The Golden Age brings the sequence full circle, revisiting the Roosevelt era, when Vidal himself was on the scene as a young man in Washington.

Vidal continued to write satirical novels, alternating them with his American historical novels. These included Myron (1974), a sequel to Myra Breckinridge; Duluth (1983); and Live from Golgotha (1992). He also wrote two satires on apocalyptic religion: Messiah (1954) and Kalki (1978). The historical and satirical veins of his writing mingled dexterously in The Smithsonian Institution (1998), a slight, whimsical novel about a 13-year-old boy wandering through the museum of history.

Vidal published a gossipy but moving memoir, Palimpsest (1995), which cut back and forth between the author's present, mostly in Ravello, and his first four frenetic decades. Portraits of his friends and enemies were sharply drawn, including the Kennedys, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, Mailer, Capote, Jack Kerouac, Eleanor Roosevelt and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. He continued the memoir with two sequels, Point to Point Navigation (2006) and Gore Vidal: Snapshots in History's Glare (2009), a volume of photographs and brief recollections.

Vidal seemed to have known everyone and been everywhere, slipping easily from the political corridors and back rooms of Washington to the poolside patios of Hollywood and the salons of European writers and intellectuals. His witty remarks became the stuff of tabloid gossip, as when a friend asked him to be the godfather of his new child, and Vidal quipped: "Always a godfather, never a god." When his editor in New York telephoned with the news that Capote had died, he responded: "A wise career move." Another time, he remarked: "Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies."

Although one can easily find connections between Vidal and previous American writers, from Mark Twain and Henry James to HL Mencken and Edmund Wilson, he remained sui generis – an American original.

Vidal is survived by his half-sister, Nina, and half-brother, Tommy.

• Gore Vidal, writer, born 3 October 1925; died 31 July 2012