Sympathy for the Devil: Four Decades of Friendship with Gore Vidal

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. "I'm exactly as I appear," he once said of himself. "There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water."

Michael Mewshaw's Sympathy for the Devil, a memoir of his friendship with the stubbornly iconoclastic public intellectual,...