I came to prefer his essays to his fiction, even though the fiction was often quite good. But the wit and erudition in his nonfiction, the breadth of his areas of interest, and the fact that he seemed to be personally acquainted with nearly every person of interest in the Anglophone world of the twentieth century, made his essays a rich feast. His book of collected essays, United States, is about nine hundred pages, and I devoured it as fast as I could.
Among the people he knew personally: John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Marilyn Monroe, Johnny Carson, Italo Calvino, Amelia Earhart. And that's just a bit of the tip of the iceberg. Plus he had something interesting to say about each of them. Vale, scriptor. Not sure if that's proper Latin, but what the hell.
Here's the Guardian obit.
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