Gore Vidal, 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, died on Tuesday at his home in the Hollywood Hills section of Los Angeles, where he moved in 2003, after years of living in Ravello, Italy. He was 86.
The cause was complications of pneumonia, his nephew Burr Steers said by telephone.
Mr. Vidal was, at the end of his life, an Augustan figure who believed himself to be the last of a breed, and he was probably right. Few American writers have been more versatile or gotten more mileage from their talent. He published some 25 novels, two memoirs and several volumes of stylish, magisterial essays. He also wrote plays, television dramas and screenplays. For a while he was even a contract writer at MGM. And he could always be counted on for a spur-of-the-moment aphorism, putdown or sharply worded critique of American foreign policy.
Perhaps more than any other American writer except Norman Mailer or Truman Capote, Mr. Vidal took great pleasure in being a public figure. ...
Mr. Vidal was an occasional actor, appearing, for example, in animated form on "The Simpsons" and "Family Guy," in the movie version of his own play "The Best Man," and in the Tim Robbins movie "Bob Roberts"...
Television was a natural medium for Mr. Vidal, who in person was often as cool and detached as he was in his prose. "Gore is a man without an unconscious," his friend the Italian writer Italo Calvino once said. Mr. Vidal said of himself: "I'm exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water."
Mr. Vidal loved conspiracy theories of all sorts, especially the ones he imagined himself at the center of, and he was a famous feuder...
By the time he was 25, he had already had more than 1,000 sexual encounters with both men and women, he boasted in his memoir "Palimpsest." Mr. Vidal tended toward what he called "same-sex sex," but frequently declared that human beings were inherently bisexual, and that labels like gay (a term he particularly disliked) or straight were arbitrary and unhelpful. For 53 years, he had a live-in companion, Howard Austen, a former advertising executive, but the secret of their relationship, he often said, was that they had never slept together. ...
Much more (w/photos):
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/01/books/gore-vidal-elegant-writer-dies-at-86.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
Blog, a searchable database of obituaries
back to 2001:
http://DeadCelebrityAlert.com
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