Characters: Lengel manager Queenie the pretty one Plaid and Big Tall Goony Goony the other

her two Sammy narrator Stokesie coworker

Major themes: The power of desire The mystery of other minds Choices and consequences (epiphany)
Minor themes: gender, power, society and class.

Oppositions : the individual versus the collective conservatism versus liberalism the working class versus the upper class women versus men and consumerism versus Romanticism

Sammy's hasty decision to quit his job (?) he is truly rebelling against the disparagement of the young women by the Puritanical manager he quits due to misguided self-interest, in hopes that the girls will notice him he is quixotically romantic, since he gains nothing through his decision except the loss of his job

Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

(1925)
American novelist, playwright, essayist, screenwriter, journalist and political activist Major themes: sex, gender, and popular culture; American history, specifically the nature of national politics His plays: The Best Man (1960) and Visit to a Small Planet (1955) were both Broadway and film successes Works under pseudonyms: as Edgar Box: Death Before Bedtime ( 1953), Death in the Fifth Position (1952) and Death Likes it Hot (1954) Novels: Burr (1973), 1876 (1976), Lincoln (1984), Empire (1987), Hollywood (1990), The Golden Age (2000), The City

and the Pillar

The City and the Pillar

3rd published novel, written in 1946 and published in 1948 the story is about a young man who is becoming an adult and finds out that he is homosexual first post-WWII novel which has an openly-gay and well-adjusted protagonist who is not killed off at the end of the story for challenging social rules ( the first serious American homosexual novel) one of the few books of the 1940s dealing directly with male homosexuality - the "definitive war-influenced gay novel among the few gay novels reprinted in inexpensive paperback form as early as the 1950s in 1965, Vidal updated the novel: The City and the Pillar Revised outraged many critics (dedicated to "J.T." - James "Jimmy" Trimble III)

The City and the Pillar

Major themes: the portrayal of the homosexual man as both normal and masculine (Gore set out to break the mold of novels that up until The City and the Pillar depicted homosexuals as travestites, lonely bookish boys, or feminine he makes his protagonist a strong athlete to challenge superstitions, stereotypes, and prejudices about sex in the U.S.) written in plain, objective prose in order to convey and document reality the foolishness and destructiveness of wishing for something that can never be to waste one's life dwelling on the past, reinforced by the novel's epigraph from the Book of Genesis 19:26 "But his wife looked back from behind him and she became a pillar of salt."