Writer Gore Vidal, 86, has died
Source: Los Angeles Times
Gore Vidal, the iconoclastic writer, savvy analyst and imperious gadfly on the national conscience, has died. He was 86.
Vidal died Tuesday at his home in the Hollywood Hills of complications of pneumonia, said nephew Burr Steers.
Vidal was a literary juggernaut who wrote 25 novels, including historical works such as “Lincoln” and “Burr” and satires such as “Myra Breckinridge” and “Duluth.” He was also a prolific essayist whose pieces on politics, sexuality, religion and literature -- once described as “elegantly sustained demolition derbies” -- both delighted and inflamed and in 1993 earned him a National Book Award for his massive “United States Essays, 1952-1992.”
Threaded throughout his pieces are anecdotes about his famous friends and foes, who included Anais Nin, Tennessee Williams, Christopher Isherwood, Orson Welles, Truman Capote, Frank Sinatra, Jack Kerouac, Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Eleanor Roosevelt and a variety of Kennedys. He counted Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Al Gore among his relatives.
Read more: http://www.latimes.com/features/books/jacketcopy/la-jc-writer-gore-vidal-86-has-died-20120731,0,3728239.story
= new reply since forum marked as read
Last edited Wed Aug 1, 2012, 12:58 AM - Edit history (1)
RIP Mr Vidal
Thank you so much for posting these videos
Written after the Supreme Court's famous "community standards" decision on obscenity, Vidal replaced all the profanity with the names of the sitting justices. The effect was hilarious and an unsparing rebuke of Puritanical tyranny. His criticism of this country was as deep and passionate as his love for it. We've lost a great American today.
