Through Petworth News, we learn that the essayist, playwright and thinker Gore Vidal will be laid to rest at Rock Creek Cemetery in Northwest Washington. While this isn’t necessarily anything newsworthy, it’s an interesting item for future chroniclers of the city’s various monuments to note.
According to Petworth News (where we snagged this photo), Vidal buried his longtime partner, Harold Auster, at the cemetery last month. The Vidal plot is located near a monument to Clover Adams, a memorial Henry Adams, the historian and presidential descendent, commissioned in 1884 in memory of his wife, who committed suicide two years earlier. Vidal is a big fan of Adams, best known for “The Education of Henry Adams,” considered by some to be one of the best works of non-fiction from the 20th century. The cemetery, located between Petworth and Fort Totten along Rock Creek Church Road, is home to a number of notable figures. According to the Political Graveyard’s entry on Rock Creek Cemetery, Vidal will join high school namesake and Postmaster General Montgomery Blair; Supreme Court Chief Justice Harlan Stone; Nebraska Sen. Thomas Tipton; the first African-American woman to hold a Cabinet post, Patricia Roberts Harris; and, among many others, Ural Alexis Johnson, the ambassador to Czechoslovakia, Japan and Thailand who survived a car bombing at the U.S. embassy in Vietnam in 1971.
