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Written by Gore Vidal

• Format: Trade Paperback, 240 pages
• Publisher: Vintage
• On Sale: December 2, 2003
• Price: $15.00
• ISBN: 978-1-4000-3037-8 (1-4000-3037-4)

about this book

A literary cause célèbre when first published more than fifty years ago, Gore Vidal’s now-classic The City and the Pillar stands as a landmark novel of the gay experience.

Jim, a handsome, all-American athlete, has always been shy around girls. But when he and his best friend, Bob, partake in “awful kid stuff,” the experience forms Jim’s ideal of spiritual completion. Defying his parents’ expectations, Jim strikes out on his own, hoping to find Bob and rekindle their amorous friendship. Along the way he struggles with what he feels is his unique bond with Bob and with his persistent attraction to other men. Upon finally encountering Bob years later, the force of his hopes for a life together leads to a devastating climax. The first novel of its kind to appear on the American literary landscape, The City and the Pillar remains a forthright and uncompromising portrayal of sexual relationships between men.


“An artistic achievement.” —The Washington Post

“One of the best novels of its kind. . . . It isn’t sentimental, and it is frank without trying to be sensational and shocking.” —Christopher Isherwood

“A brilliant exposé of subterranean life.” —The Atlantic Monthly

“The City and the Pillar remains as fresh, engaging, relevant, and—yes—sexy as it was when it first appeared. Here is early evidence of the acuity and boldness that have contributed to make Gore Vidal our country’s most uncompromising literary intelligence.” —David Leavitt

“The City and the Pillar is evocative, sad, clear-eyed, and searingly familiar, even to those who journey through a society less repressive than the one it describes. It is a classic in the grand tradition of Oscar Wilde and E. M. Forster, simple in its manner but fully artistic in its conception and prose.” —Andrew Solomon

“The City and the Pillar is a win-win reading experience. Beginning as a fascinating time capsule of gays leading clandestine lives of the don’t-ask/don’t-tell/don’t-even-think-it variety in the 1940s, the novel in its final chapters dares to take on the theme of relations between gay and straight men in America, a civil war that has yet to find its truce. As with so many of Vidal’s books, The City and the Pillar proves to have been insanely ahead of its time.” —Brad Gooch

“Highly entertaining, The City and the Pillar combines the moral seriousness of André Gide with the steamy giddiness of pulp fiction. Is it a period piece, or is it a classic? Both. That’s the pleasure of this riveting novel, entirely worth rediscovering.” —Wayne Koestenbaum

“Look back in admiration at The City and the Pillar and then read it. You will find compelling, historic American literature.” —Catharine R. Stimpson, New York University

“For Philip Larkin, sexual intercourse began in 1963, between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatle’s first LP. For American readers, the sexual revolution began a little earlier, on January 9, 1948, to be precise, when this modestly presented realistic novel about ferocious desires was first published. Before that date, sex in America was as it always was–hot, mad, slow, beautiful, dull, sly, damp, loathsome, amazing, delicious, demanding, destructive, astonishing, a dream, a dance, a song, a game–but when this book appeared, hyperbolic Henry Miller had to move over and make space on his cot for Gore Vidal, and sex was never the same again, at least not on the printed page.” —Alan Cheuse

“This new edition of The City and the Pillar promises to supply the occasion to recognize the key role Gore Vidal’s extraordinary novel has played in redefining what counts as the sexually normative.” —Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth College

“A remarkable and characteristically courageous achievement. At once a penetrating study of self-deception and an unsentimental analysis of gay life in the 1940s, it traces convincingly a young man's awakening while also locating this experience in the vast expanses and repetitive patterns of myth.” —Claude J. Summers, author of Gay Fiction: Wilde to Stonewall–Studies in a Male Homosexual Literary Tradition and editor of Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage: A Reader’s Companion to the Writers and Their Works, from Antiquity to the Present

“The City and the Pillar had the courage to subject American masculinity, in all its parochialism, to the kind of scrutiny that only one who dared to be himself, like Gore Vidal, could achieve. This is a novel about original sin, American style.” —Bernard F. Dick, author of The Apostate Angel: A Critical Study of Gore Vidal