“Vanity Fair” columnist James Wolcott has written a Kindle Single for Amazon about Gore Vidal, which he calls a “fast-moving meditation on the life and times and major battles of Gore Vidal, who met his stoic fate on July 31st.”

Here’s an excerpt from the opening:

[The] death that most ceremoniously lowered the curtain on an era, an ideal, and an avocation, was that of Gore Vidal, who nodded his last on July 31st, age 86. Tottering on walking sticks in his later years before being resigned to a wheelchair, where he still looked in charge, enthroned, dispensing papal benediction on those who came to pay homage, Vidal had been edging to the Exit Door, as he put it, for some time. It didn’t make it any easier to see him go. We shall never see his like again. But then we had never seen his like before. He was a stately, head-sculptured presence for so long that we took for granted how improbable that presence was. Practically an emanation.

Kindle Singles are available only at Amazon.com.