As many of you have probably heard, Gore Vidal passed away on Tuesday. A prolific writer, Vidal published a long list of well-known books, as well as plays, television dramas, and screenplays.
Less well known is the fact that Vidal—or rather, a character based upon Vidal—appears in the well known high school staple A Separate Peace. Vidal and the book’s author, John Knowles, were classmates at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire in the early 1940s. Knowles used Vidal as the model for Brinker Hadley, the “know-it-all conspiracy theorist” character in his boarding-school based novel, The New York Times writes.