Gore Vidal Passes Away At The Age Of 86
Author and playwright Gore Vidal has passed away in Los Angeles at the age of 86, leaving behind him a literary body of work spanning several decades and touching upon such issues as sexuality, pop culture and (most distasteful of all) politics.
As a boy, Vidal lived in Washington, D.C., with his namesake, his maternal grandfather, Oklahoma’s legendary blind senator, Thomas P. Gore.
After prep school, Vidal didn’t attend college, but said he received a great education just by reading to his grandfather.
Vidal also was a distant cousin of former vice president Al Gore, whom he avoided, as he put it, “on the ground that one day plausible deniability will be useful to each of us.”
The New York Times describes him as “the elegant, acerbic all-around man of letters who presided with a certain relish over what he declared to be the end of American civilization,” adding this:
Mr. Vidal loved conspiracy theories of all sorts, especially the ones he imagined himself at the center of, and he was a famous feuder; he engaged in celebrated on-screen wrangles with Mailer, Capote and William F. Buckley Jr. Mr. Vidal did not lightly suffer fools — a category that for him comprised a vast swath of humanity, elected officials especially — and he was not a sentimentalist or a romantic. “Love is not my bag,” he said.
His family has cited complications from pneumonia as the cause of death.
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