Death in the Fifth Position

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Gore Vidal is the author of twenty-four novels, six plays, two memoirs, numerous screenplays and short stories, and well over two hundred essays. His United States: Essays, 1952–1992 received the National Book Award.

E. P. Dutton, an ancient New York publishing house, issued my first novel, Williwaw, a wartime sea story. This was my first novel, and I was nineteen. It was set in the Aleutian Islands, where I served during World War II aboard a U.S. Army freight supply ship stationed at Dutch Harbor.

The book did reasonably well and was much praised by the daily book reviewer for the Sunday New York Times, one Orville Prescott. He ended his review by saying that he suspected that I would have a very long career. But of course, when I later wrote a novel that he opposed on moral grounds, The City and the Pillar, he refused to review my next four or five novels. In response, I wrote a small piece saying how little I regarded book reviewing in the great city of New York, an opinion that I still hold. But at the time, as an unknown writer, it was very dangerous to take on the New York Times.

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