Gore Vidal, the seminal wordsmith, jack of all things witty, provocative, and erudite in the many writings he authored, who always seemed to have his finger firmly entrenched on the pulse of the national culture politically and socially throughout much of the mid-20th century, died of complications from pneumonia on July 31, 2012, in Hollywood at his home, reports The New York Times. The news was confirmed by his nephew, the filmmaker Burr Steers, who said his uncle had been sick for some time. Vidal was 86 years old.

He spread himself eclectically in the arts, mainly in the literary circuits and was responsible for penning over 20 books in his lifetime. One of them, his third, entitled The City and the Pillar, published in 1948, was one of the first major tomes to explore themes of homosexuality (Vidal himself was bisexual), something that was all but taboo during that post-World War II, post-President Roosevelt America. Vidal’s penchant for syntax and printed word ran at fever pitch; he penned essays on sundry hotbed topics as sexuality, religion, politics, and literature, the results of which equally divided the followers and haters of his works and eventually earned him National Book Award honors in the early 1990s for a voluminous anthology of those essays, which spanned 40 years in the book, and was entitled United States Essays, 1952-1992. Vidal is also well known for his historical assessments on the lives of Abraham Lincoln and Aaron Burr, as well as the satiric novel Myra Beckinridge, which was adapted into a cult campy arguably awful film in 1970 starring Raquel Welch as a transsexual and also starring the inimitable Mae West.