Gore Vidal, who died in July, was one of our greatest novelists and essayists – and yet he never went to college. In a 2007 interview I asked him why not.

“I graduated from [Phillips] Exeter,” he explained, “and I was aimed at going to Harvard. Instead I enlisted in [the Navy] in 1943. When I got out, in ’46, I thought, ‘I’ve spent all my life in institutions that I loathe, including my service in the [Navy] of the United States.’ I thought, ‘Shall I go for another four years?’

“My first book was already being published” — it was the novel Williwaw, and it got good reviews. “I said ‘I’m going to be told how to write by somebody at Harvard.’ I said, ‘This is too great a risk.’ “

The audience of 2,000 at a book festival at the University of California at Los Angeles laughed and applauded.

“But I did go there to lecture,” he added. “This was about ’47 or ’48. There was a big audience, and many of them were my classmates from Exeter, who were overage juniors and seniors in what looked to be their mid-forties. I came out cheerily, as is my wont, and I’ve never felt such hatred radiating. They’d all predicted my total failure, because I was not to go to Harvard and meet a publisher or an agent — which is, I think, why they went.”

Read the full excerpt in Inside Higher Education