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Myra Breckinridge is a 1968 satirical novel by Gore Vidal written in the form of a diary. It was made into a movie in 1970. Described by the critic Dennis Altman as "part of a major cultural assault on the assumed norms of gender and sexuality which swept the western world in the late 1960s and early 1970s,"[1] the book's major themes are feminism, transsexuality, American expressions of machismo and patriarchy, and deviant sexual practices, as filtered through an aggressively camp sensibility. Set in Hollywood in the 1960s, the novel also contains candid and irreverent glimpses into the machinations within the film industry.
The book was dismissed by some of the era's more conservative critics as pornographic at the time of its first publication in February 1968, but nevertheless immediately became a worldwide bestseller and has since come to be considered a classic in some circles. "It is tempting to argue that Vidal said more to subvert the dominant rules of sex and gender in Myra than is contained in a shelf of queer theory treatises," wrote Dennis Altman.[2] Critic Harold Bloom cites Myra Breckinridge as a canonical work in his book The Western Canon. In 1974 Vidal published a sequel, Myron.
In his memoir Palimpsest, Vidal would suggest that the voice of Myra may have been inspired by the "megalomania" of Anaïs Nin's diaries.
