How to Be an Intellectual in the Age of TV

“How to Be an Intellectual in the Age of TV is an illuminating, wide-ranging, and provocative examination of Gore Vidal’s mulitple public identities—novelist, screenwriter, political commentator, TV personality. Marcie Frank’s insights into Vidal’s unique career and the cultural context in which it unfolded will appeal to anyone with an interest in American popular and literary cultures and the places where the two intersect.”—Tom Perrotta, author of the novels Little Children, Joe College, and Election

“While other literary-minded writers of his generation (Updike, Bellow, Baldwin, Roth) barricaded themselves in bookchat, Gore Vidal took the full plunge into the new media age. There is no comparable figure to suture the two worlds, or two epochs.”—Michael Warner, author of Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life

“With her pithy deadpan and unresting curiosity, Marcie Frank is a wonderful interlocutor for Vidal. Fusing a startling range of recent histories, her short book is full of satisfying double-takes and provocations.”—Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, author of Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity

“Ultimately, for mass communication historians, Frank’s book primarily is a specific wake-up call about the possibilities of studying novelists as news sources of many times and even as newsworthy figures, and a general wake-up call about the lack of research (at least in the United States because Europe is far ahead here) on journalism, other mass media, and intellectuals (‘public’ or not).”

~Dane S. Claussen, Journalism History