The novelist and essayist Gore Vidal has passed away. He was 86 years old.

He wrote many novels, screenplays and a bookshelf full of inspiring essays. His novels included: Myra Breckinridge, Burr , Lincoln, 1876, Empire, Hollywood, and Washington, D.C.

Here is an excerpt from an essay about Orson Welles that ends with a magical phone call between Vidal, Welles, and singer Rudy Vallee. It is a haunting way to remember the great author.

I have a recurring fantasy that if one were to dial the telephone number of someone in the past, one would hear again a familiar voice, and time would instantly rewind from now to then. I still have Orson’s telephone number in my book (213-851-8458) … From out of the past, I hear, “My time is your time,” in that reedy highly imitable voice. The afterlife’s only a dial tone away. “What makes you think that this is the afterlife?” Orson chuckles. “This is a recording.” Stop story here.

Follow this link to read more of Vidal’s classic work for The New York Review of Books. Click here to watch more Vidal video material at CSPAN.

Below, we’ve embedded a YouTube video of Vidal’s famous television confrontation with William Buckley during the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago.