Gore Vidal, 86, a celebrated writer, cultural gadfly and occasional political candidate, died of pneumonia Tuesday at his Hollywood Hills home, a nephew has confirmed .


Known for his urbanity and wit — “Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little” — Vidal’s literary career spanned more than 60 years, and he once said that he hoped to be remembered as “the person who wrote the best sentences of his time,” The Washington Post reported.


Vidal was born Oct. 3, 1925, at West Point, N.Y., where his father, Eugene Vidal, was teaching aeronautics at the military academy. His mother, Nina, was the socialite daughter of Sen. T.P. Gore of Oklahoma. Christened Eugene Luther Gore Vidal, the writer later lopped off the first two names “for political as well as for aesthetic reasons.” He said that “this often has been gleefully interpreted as a rejection of my father, whom I liked, in order to become my mother, whom I disliked.”


In fact, so great was his antagonism toward his mother that Vidal stopped seeing her during the last 25 years of her life. He hero-worshipped his father, a former Olympic athlete in the decathlon.


Young Vidal spent much of his childhood in Washington and was particularly attached to his grandfather. The senator was blind, so the boy spent many hours reading to him aloud, thus inaugurating his lifelong passion for learning and books.


In his childhood, Vidal loved L. Frank Baum’s stories about Oz, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan adventures, the fantasies of E. Nesbit, and every sort of history: “The first grown-up book that I read on my own was a nineteenth-century edition of Tales from Livy that I’d found in my grandfather’s library.” By the age of 14, he wrote, “I wanted to know the entire history of the entire world.”


Vidal attended St Albans School, where he fell in love with a fellow student named Jimmie Trimble, who was killed in combat on Iwo Jima during World War II. In his memoirs “Palimpsest” (1995) and “Point to Point Navigation” (2006), Vidal makes clear that this youthful passion, cut short by Trimble’s death, marked his entire life: He never truly loved anyone again, although he would enjoy hundreds of sexual encounters, most of them with anonymous strangers, in which he took pleasure but, as he repeatedly insisted, never gave any except inadvertently.