Gore Vidal, 86
Iconoclastic author, savvy analyst and glorious gadfly on the national conscience, Vidal died Tuesday at his home in the Hollywood Hills from complications of pneumonia, his nephew Burr Steers said. He was 86.
"Style," Vidal once said, "is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn." By that definition, he was an emperor of style, sophisticated and cantankerous in his prophesies of America's fate and refusal to let others define him.
"I am at heart a propagandist, a tremendous hater, a tiresome nag, complacently positive that there is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise," he said in "Gore Vidal: A Biography" (1999) by Fred Kaplan.
Despite his crushing forthrightness on many topics, Vidal preferred ambiguity in the personal realm.
Vidal, who was never married and had no children, wrote in his memoirs about sexual contacts with men, including Kerouac, the Beat poet and writer. But, to the dismay of gay activists, Vidal rejected efforts to put him in any sexual category. He was famous for proclaiming that "there are not homosexual people, only homosexual acts."