Sympathy for the devil
Subtitle: four decades of friendship with Gore Vidal
By: Michael Mewshaw
Edition: First edition.
Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 200
ISBN-13: 9780374280482
Subjects: Friends and associates; American Authors; Biography
Other titles: Four decades of friendship with Gore Vidal; 4 decades of friendship with Gore Vidal
Description: "An intimate memoir of the author's long friendship with notoriously difficult author, Gore Vidal"--Provided by publisher.

"Gore Vidal, a man who prided himself on being difficult to know, detached and ironic; a master of the pointed put-down, of the cutting quip; enigmatic, impossible to truly know. This is the calcified, public image of Gore Vidal--one the man himself was fond of reinforcing ... Michael Mewshaw's Sympathy for the Devil, a memoir of his friendship with the stubbornly iconoclastic public intellectual, is a welcome corrective to this tired received wisdom. A complex, nuanced portrait emerges in these pages--and while Gore can indeed be brusque, standoffish, even cruel, Mewshaw also catches him in more vulnerable moments. The Gore Vidal the reader comes to know here is generous and supportive to younger, less successful writers; he is also, especially toward the end of his life, disappointed, even lonely"--Provided by publisher.