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Gore Vidal biography will be released in 2015

Vidal's close friend, author and academic Jay Parini, will write the biography.

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Carol Tedesco/Florida Keys News Bureau/AP
Writer Gore Vidal, who passed away on July 31 of this year, knew biographer Jay Parini for more than 30 years.
  • By Molly Driscoll Staff Writer

American author and academic Jay Parini will pen a biography about the late author Gore Vidal, to be released sometime in 2015.

Parini, who was a friend of Vidal’s, will release the book through Doubleday.

Doubleday executive editor and vice president Gerald Howard told the New York Times that Parini’s 30-odd-year friendship with Vidal would deeply inform the book and that Parini and Vidal had talked at least weekly, if not more often, for the past decades.

“He knows a lot about Gore that he’s heard directly from the source, and that’s certainly one of the major things that’s going to inform the biography, this intimate acquaintance that they had,” Howard said.

Parini was the editor for the book “Gore Vidal: Against the Grain,” an essay collection about the writer published in 1992, and has taken on other literary titans including William Faulkner and John Steinbeck in his biographies. He is also a professor at Middlebury College and the author of the 1990 novel "The Last Station" about the tumultuous late years of the life of Leo Tolstoy.

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