HuffingtonPost asked me to write something about Gore Vidal for the HuffPost Books section.
Vidal tributes and obits will briefly abound. Yes, he was a sharp, cynical, free-thinking satirist in the style of Mark Twain and H. L. Menken. Yes, he was raised in the twilight of the Washington D.C. political class when there actually was such a thing, when Washington was still a shockingly sleepy Southern city vacated by the electeds every summer. (Vidal once remarked that air-conditioning helped found the American empire by letting bureaucrats stay in town year-round making mischief.) Yes, he had a lot of cameos in a lot of films, wined and dined a lot of famous friends at his Ravello home, La Rondinaia, had famous foes, and managed to outlive pretty much all of them.
And he made it all look easy. But it wasn't.
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