Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal is one of the few authors appearing in the transitive title game in which it's the author's name, not a word in the book title, that changes case to make the joke. And since he chose his own first name (he was born Eugene Jr.), it's his own fault.

One of his obituaries notes something I'd read before, that Michelle Bachmann was so disgusted by Vidal's novel Burr that she relabeled herself from Democrat to Republican in response. That is not Vidal's fault. I was pretty disgusted by Burr myself - I found it a slimy, libelous book on dead people who can't answer back - but I didn't blame the entire Democratic party or left-wing politics for it and I didn't jump into the opposite camp's even worse flaws.

In general I agreed with a lot of what Vidal said but considered the way he said it to be almost uniformly counter-productive. (That includes what he said about Wm F. Buckley.) Consequently I mostly tried to ignore him. As an actor in the movie Bob Roberts, playing the liberal Senator opposed for re-election by the underhanded Roberts, Vidal did well early on, but by the end of the movie, director-star Tim Robbins had permitted it to turn into the "Gore Vidal Pontificates" Show, and it lost interest.