The City and the Pillar Gore Vidal
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

"Even so," he said quickly, "there are other things in life than being in love. He'd dedicated his novel The City and the Pillar to "JT" when it was published in 1948. With what I want." Jim thought of Bob. The City and the Pillar (1948), written when Vidal was just twenty-three years old, is the story of professional tennis player Jim Willard, a man who never outgrew his boyhood crush on his best friend Bob Ford. In any case, I never felt Vidal's sexuality was the point: he told us as much about his romantic life in his first novel, “Williwaw,” and in “The City and the Pillar,” as I find necessary. But he never forgot Trimble, either. He was even forced to work under pseudonyms during the 1950s. Sometimes recalls aloud — just as I repeat back to him — the epigraph of Gore Vidal's great novel about youth and loss, The City and the Pillar. He's never in love, are you?" "Of course I am. The City and the Pillar, Gore Vidal. Vidal wasn't invited to the field rededication. His third novel, The City and the Pillar, featured a homosexual as a main character and bookshops refused to stock it. Was a premature gay martyr (on this, you don't know half the story: see Neil McKenna's The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde on his underground activities), and therefore a “natural” topic for the author of The City and the Pillar. That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.