He also brought shrewd intelligence to writing Broadway hits, Hollywood screenplays, television dramas and a trio of mysteries still in print after 50 years.
When he wasn't writing, he was popping up in movies, playing himself in "Fellini's Roma," a sinister plotter in sci-fi thriller "Gattaca" and a U.S. senator in "Bob Roberts." The grandson of a U.S. senator, he also made two entertaining but unsuccessful forays into politics, running for the Senate from California and the House of Representatives from New York.
In other spare moments, he demolished intellectual rivals like Norman Mailer and William F. Buckley Jr. with acidic one-liners, establishing himself as a peerless master of talk-show punditry.
More than 500 of the world's leading authors, including five Nobel prize winners, have condemned the...
EDITOR'S NOTE — On Dec. 7, 1941, Eugene Burns, AP's chief of bureau in Honolulu, couldn't...
