Gore Vidal, the elegant, bitter versatile man of letters who has presided over a sample of what is called the end of American civilization, died Tuesday at home in the Hollywood Hills section of Los Angeles, where moved in 2003 after years of living in Ravello, Italy. He was 86 years.
The cause was complications of pneumonia, his nephew Burr Steers, said by telephone.
Vidal was at the end of his life, a figure of August, which is believed to be the last of a breed, and probably was right. Few writers of Latin America have been more versatile and has more kilometers of driving talent.
He has published about 25 novels, two memoirs and several volumes of the fashion, master tests. He also wrote plays, television dramas and movies.
For a time he was also a writer contract with MGM. And he could always count on an aphorism of stimulus-of-the-moment, or contempt vigorous critique of U.S. foreign policy.
Perhaps more than any other American writer Norman Mailer and Truman Capote exception, Mr. Vidal has the pleasure of being a public figure.
He worked here twice - in 1960, when he was the Democratic candidate for Congress in District 29 in New York state, and in 1982, when California was campaigning for a Senate seat and, although he lose sometimes, often acted as a kind of shadow president is not chosen. Once said: "It is a human problem that could not be solved if people just do what I recommend."
Mr. Vidal was an occasional actor, appearing, for example, in the form of cartoon "The Simpsons" and "Family Guy" in the film version of his own play "The Best Man" and Tim Robbins Bob Roberts, "where he performed a version of himself aging hermaphrodite. was more than an occasional guest on television programs, on balance, the spirit and the charm is turned into a regular Johnny Carson was offered a job as host of "Tonight Show".
Television is a natural for Mr. Vidal, who was often cold and distant, as it was in his prose. "Gore is a man without unconscious," his friend, the Italian writer Italo Calvino once said. Vidal said of himself: "They show up just like me There's a warm person, loving inside In my cold outside, once you break the ice is cold ..."
Mr. Vidal loved all kinds of conspiracy theories, especially those who are supposed to center, and was a famous fief, held on the screen in conflict with his Mailer, Capote and William F. Buckley Jr.
Mr. Vidal does not suffer fools lightly - a category which for him includes a wide swath of humanity, chosen in particular - and that was not a sentimental or romantic. "Love is not my bag," he said.
At the time I was 25 years, I had over 1,000 sexual encounters with men and women, boasted in his memoir "Palimpsest." Mr. Vidal tends toward what he calls "the sex of the same sex," but frequently says that humans were inherently bisexual and that the labels as a homosexual (a term he liked very much) directly or were arbitrary and useless.
For 53 years, had a live-in companion, Howard Austen, a former advertising executive, but the secret of their relationship, often said, was that they never slept together.
Mr. Vidal sometimes claimed to be a populist - in theory, anyway - but it was not convincing as a. Both by temperament and was an aristocrat by birth.
Eugene Luther Gore Vidal Jr. was born on October 3, 1925, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where his father, Eugenio, was an All-American football player and track star and returned as a flight instructor and assistant football coach.
An aviation pioneer, Mr. Eugene Vidal found three more airlines, including one that became TWA E 'was Director of the Bureau of Air Commerce under President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Mr. Vidal's mother, Nina, was an actress and socialité and the daughter of Thomas Pryor Gore, Democrat Senator for Oklahoma. (Mr. Vidal was related to the former vice president Al Gore.)
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