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In 1940 Vidal entered Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and, echoing his grandfather's fierce isolationism, soon joined the school's America First movement. "He fancied himself a campus politician," recalls Classmate Robert Bingham, now an editor at The New Yorker. Student government allowed Vidal to act out childhood dreams. "There was a senate," Bingham says, "and he pretended to represent Oklahoma. He threw himself into it, and I'm sure he saw himself as a Senator." A streak of vanity surfaced; opponents noticed that Vidal always presented his better profile during debates. A less-than-brilliant student, Vidal never made it to the advanced English class. But he published poems and stories in the school Review, began and abandoned a novel, and changed his name from Gene to Gore. His graduation yearbook named him Class Hypocrite.
As if in confirmation, Vidal immediately dropped his isolationism. On July 30, 1943, he joined the Enlisted Reserve Corps of the U.S. Army and later landed in the Transportation Corps. He spent some months as a warrant officer aboard a freighter plying the seas around the Aleutians. Vidal used the empty hours to begin Williwaw, a Hemingwayesque tale of men at sea. By the time he was discharged in 1946, he had finished it and a second novel as well. When Williwaw was published that March, Vidal was heralded as a prodigy of American letters.
It was a heady time to be young, famous and among the first into the era of postwar fiction. Vidal did not attend college; instead, he joined the class of Norman Mailer, Irwin Shaw, James Jones, John Hersey. An Alabama gamin named Truman Capote materialized, and he and Vidal were soon nightclubbing together and meeting for weekly gossip lunches amid the palms of New York's Plaza Hotel. "It was deadly to get caught in the crossfire of their conversation," recalls one who was there. "They were a pair of gilded youths on top of the world."
But perhaps because success had come so easily, Vidal soon grew "bored with playing it safe." In 1948 he published The City and the Pillar, a sympathetic story of homosexuality. The novel's subdued, discreet portrait of physical love between males was shocking for its time. The sensation it caused made The City and the Pillar a bestseller. It also may have harmed the author. The New York Times refused to run advertisements for the book. Many critics were angered and decided that Vidal had betrayed their earlier praise. During the next six years, his star declined. He published five more novels to a generally tepid recognition from reviewers and the public. His average income from each was about $5,000.
That was hardly enough to maintain the Vidal style, much less Edgewater, which he had bought in 1950. Searching for a way to support himself with his pen, Vidal decided to try writing for television. The Iron Pyrites age had arrived and with it came a voracious demand for new material. Vidal rapidly mastered the demands of the teleplay form and ultimately commanded fees as high as $5,000 for a one-hour script.