Gore Vidal, American author

[Flying Horse]

R.I.P. Gore Vidal, celebrated novelist (Lincoln, Burr, Myra Breckenridge), politician, essayist, playwright (The Best Man) & screenwriter (Ben Hur), whose vast range of published works and public remarks were stamped by his immodest wit and unconventional wisdom, died at age 86 from complications from pneumonia in Los Angelses. Vidal is survived by his half-sister Nina Straight and half brother Tommy Auchincloss.

He was wealthy and famous and committed to exposing a system often led by men he knew firsthand. Along with such contemporaries as Norman Mailer and Truman Capote, he was among the last generation of literary writers who were also genuine celebrities — personalities of such size and appeal that even those who hadn't read their books knew their names.
He was widely admired as an independent thinker — in the tradition of Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken — about literature, culture, politics and, as he liked to call it, "the birds and the bees." He picked apart politicians, living and dead; mocked religion and prudery; opposed wars from Vietnam to Iraq and insulted his peers like no other, once observing that the three saddest words in the English language were "Joyce Carol Oates." (The happiest words: "I told you so").
He adored the wisdom of Montaigne, the imagination of Calvino, the erudition and insight of Henry James and Edith Wharton. He detested Thomas Pynchon, John Barth and other authors of "teachers' novels." He once likened Mailer's views on women to those of Charles Manson's. (From this the head-butting incident ensued, backstage at "The Dick Cavett Show.") He derided Buckley, on television, as a "crypto Nazi." He was accused of anti-Semitism after labeling conservative Norman Podhoretz a member of "the Israeli fifth column." He labeled Ronald Reagan "The Acting President" and identified Reagan's wife, Nancy, as a social climber "born with a silver ladder in her hand."
In recent years, Vidal wrote the novel The Smithsonian Institution and the nonfiction best sellers Perpetual War For Perpetual Peace and Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta. A second memoir, Point to Point Navigation, came out in 2006. But Lincoln stands as his most notable work of historical fiction, vetted and admired by a leading Lincoln biographer, David Herbert Donald, although some scholars objected to Vidal's unawed portrayal of the president.
Age and illness did not bring Vidal closer to God. Wheelchair-bound in his 80s and saddened by the death of many peers and close friends, the author still looked to no existence beyond this one. "Because there is no cosmic point to the life that each of us perceives on this distant bit of dust at galaxy's edge," he once wrote, "all the more reason for us to maintain in proper balance what we have here. "Because there is nothing else. No thing. This is it. And quite enough, all in all." R.I.P. Gore Vidal, a man of much charm and biting wit. Definitely one of a kind in this day and age.

[Forever Sunshine]

RIP Gore Vidal