Gore Vidal:
“The five-year period from 1945 to 1950 was an extraordinary interregnum. We were not conducting either a hot war or a cold war and there was a sudden explosion of the arts. Jerome Robbins and George Balanchine were at their best. Tennessee Williams’s A Street Car Named Desire and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman were on Broadway at the same time. The 1948 bestseller list included Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, and my third novel, The City and the Pillar. We had a renaissance. Then in 1950 we went to war in Korea. Then we had McCarthyism.”
