Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal has died. As a younger man I found his heterodox views bracing, but I would commend to readers two books Vidal wrote which I feel often get forgotten in the shadow of his American historical novels, Creation and Julian. As a polemicist one must always view Vidal's claims of fact with some suspicion (granted, I suspect I'm in more sympathy with some of his interpretations of history than most), but his historical fiction can rise above such a critique.