An Elegant, Acerbic Man of Letters -- Gone

“You hear all this whining going on, ‘Where are our great writers?’ The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?” -- Gore Vidal in Esquire, 2008

Well, you can certainly count me as one. My first exposure to fiction by Gore Vidal -- who died last night in Los Angeles at age 86 -- came during the late 1970s, when Vintage republished all three of the mystery novels he’d penned in