Vidal's historical fiction includes an interlocking septet of American novels—consisting of Washington, D.C. (1967), Burr (1973), 1876 (1976), Lincoln (1984), Empire (1987), Hollywood (1990), and The Golden Age (2000)—as well as Julian (1964), Creation (1982), Live from Golgotha (1992), and The Smithsonian Institution (1998). Among his plays are Visit to a Small Planet (1955) and The Best Man (1960). Vidal's sharply argued and often controversial essays have been collected in several volumes, including Reflections on a Sinking Ship (1969), The Second American Revolution (1982), Armageddon (1987), Screening History (1992), United States: Essays 1952-1992 (1993), and The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000 (2001). He has also written murder mysteries under the name Edgar Box.

In 1996, Clinton and Gore were reelected. Gore immediately was regarded as the leading candidate for his party's 2000 presidential nomination; he began actively campaigning in 1999 and won a majority of the Democratic delegates early in 2000. Gore chose Connecticut senator Joseph Lieberman as his running mate. Despite winning the popular vote, the Democratic ticket lost to Republicans George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Gore's campaign was hurt by the Green party candidate, Ralph Nader, and the extremely narrow loss of Florida's electoral votes. Gore sought manual recounts of computer punch card ballots from heavily Democratic Florida counties, but ultimately lost (Dec. 12) in the Supreme Court, which split 5-4 along ideological lines. Subsequent studies of the ballots by newspapers indicated (2001) that the outcome of the election in Florida depended on the method used to recount the ballots and on the counties whose votes were recounted. The legal, political, and media battles fought over the election, as well as the delay in finalizing the results, made the 2000 presidential vote the most contentious since the Hayes-Tilden election in 1876.

Soon after the election, Gore began teaching journalism at Columbia. In 2005 he cofounded Current TV, a news and features network on which a significant portion of the programming is created by its viewers. Gore also renewed his work on behalf of the environment, which crested in 2006 with the publication of his book An Inconvenient Truth and the documentary film of the same name (Academy Award, 2007); both deal with the perils of global warming. In 2007 he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for their efforts to alert people to the threats posed by climate change caused by human activity and for their work in helping to disseminate information on possible solutions. Later that year he became a partner in a private equity firm with strong interests in "green" technology. He also received the $1 million Dan David Present Prize for his environmental work in 2008. Gore is the son of Albert Arnold Gore, Sr., 1907-98, a politician and Democratic senator from Tennessee (1953-71).

(born Oct. 3, 1925, West Point, N.Y., U.S.) U.S. novelist, playwright, and essayist. Vidal began publishing his writings soon after his wartime army service. Though he wrote stage plays and television and film screenplays, he is best known for his irreverent and intellectually adroit novels. The City and the Pillar (1948) became notorious for its homoerotic subject matter. Myra Breckinridge (1968) was acclaimed for its wild satire. His other novels, many of them historical and most of them best-sellers, include Julian (1964), Washington, D.C. (1967), Burr (1974), 1876 (1976), and Lincoln (1984). He also published several essay collections and the memoir Palimpsest (1996). Known for his iconoclastically leftist political analyses, he twice ran unsuccessfully for Congressional office.

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(born March 31, 1948, Washington, D.C., U.S.) U.S. politician. He was the son of Albert Gore, who served in the U.S. Senate from Tennessee. After graduating from Harvard University, he briefly attended divinity school before serving in the Vietnam War as a military reporter (1969–71). He worked as a reporter for The Tennessean in Nashville (1971–76) while attending first divinity school and then law school at Vanderbilt University. He served in the U.S. House of Representatives (1977–85) and later the Senate (1985–93). A moderate Democrat, he was Bill Clinton's vice presidential running mate in 1992 and served two terms (1993–2001) as vice president under Clinton. As the Democratic presidential nominee in 2000, he won over 500,000 more popular votes than Republican George W. Bush but narrowly lost the electoral vote (271–266). Gore subsequently devoted much of his time to environmental issues, and his 2006 film on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, won an Academy Award for best documentary. For his environmental work, he received, with the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the 2007 Nobel Prize for Peace. In 2007 he also earned an Emmy Award for creative achievement in interactive television for Current TV, a user-generated-content channel he cofounded in 2005.

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