S. K. Epperson

The American writer Gore Vidal, died on Tuesday evening aged 86, from pneumonia. He passing signals the end of a group of writers whose heyday was in the 60s and 70s and who were known for their uncompromising prose and their often controversial views. They became fixtures of the chat show circuit in the 70s when cigarette smoke still wafted around the studio, as did intelligent conversation. Those days are long gone.

Vidal was part of a loose affiliation of writers whose novels and essays changed the face of American Literature. Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and Hunter S Thompson were the other writers whose fierce, relentless writing scorched across the landscape of American letters. Capote died young, the victim of alcohol and drugs, in 1984; Thompson committed suicide in 2005; Mailer died in 2007. And now the last of the literary outlaws has passed.

Something that made these writers seem…