The City and the Pillar by Gore Vidal

The City and the Pillar Gore Vidal ebook
Page: 240
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
ISBN: 9781400030378
Format: pdf

He'd dedicated his novel The City and the Pillar to "JT" when it was published in 1948. The City knew it was time to upgrade an old, dilapidated, unsafe above ground park but funds were limited and resources were tight. On Alexius's recommendation, we read the book, a source of escape for Alexius. After publishing a Hemingway-style war novel when he was barely twenty, he attracted unusual attention in 1948 with his third novel, The City and the Pillar. An iconoclast ahead of his time, he candidly wrote about homosexuality in an early novel, The City and the Pillar, which got him blacklisted by book critics at the New York Times. Upon first publication in 1948, The City and the Pillar received a wave of critical attention – positive and negative – and assured Gore Vidal a lifetime place in American letters. Vidal wasn't invited to the field rededication. But he never forgot Trimble, either. The City and The Pillar follows the life of a very confused boy named Jim. When Jim was young he never really dated girls, or had any interest in them. "Multiple cultures are the profound cultural heritage of the city," said Liu Wei-gong, Commissioner of the Department of Cultural Affairs, Taipei City Government. Just finished Gore Vidal's “The City and the Pillar,” a novel to which I should have treated myself years ago. 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. But I probably wasn't ready to read it then. He chose to serve Jimmy Trimble, a teenager with whom he fell in love in boarding school and who provided inspiration for The City and the Pillar, and in doing so betrayed the bigotry of American society. But it was his second, The City and the Pillar, that truly established him. Perhaps the hysterical reaction to The City and the Pillar was what started a long process of alienation from the Establishment into which Vidal had been born. Sao Lak Muang or the city pillar was raised at the start of the Rattanakosin era as the foundation for Bangkok, the new capital of Thailand. Every single pillar is supposed to feature a neighbourhood map, right on the skinny part that faces the sidewalk.