As a young writer, Vidal joined a salon of literati and aristocrats hosted in New York by Peggy Guggenheim. He met Andre Gide and George Santayana, began a lifelong friendship with Paul Newman, got Harry Truman and Eleanor Roosevelt to compaign for him when he ran for Congress, and gave presidential candidate JFK the idea for the Peace Corps. To date, Vidal has published twenty-nine novels, a short story collection, six plays, numerous books of non-fiction, plus screenplays (inc. Ben Hur). His novel The City and the Pillar was a ground-breaking work in the history of homosexual literature.