The author, playwright, politician and commentator died Tuesday at his home in the Hollywood Hills of complications from pneumonia. He was 86.
Aug. 01, 2012
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Vidal and a collection of writers and poets (including Tennessee Williams and W.H. Auden) attend a cocktail party at New York City's Gotham Book Mart in November 1948. Between 1946 and '54, Vidal published eight novels including The City and the Pillar, The Judgment of Paris and Messiah. The City and the Pillar was one of the first novels in American fiction to feature explicit homosexuality. Vidal's next five novels were ignored by the mainstream press.