Person of the Year 2010

For connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them, for creating a new system of exchanging information and for changing how we live our lives, Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is TIME's 2010 Person of the Year

Louis Auchincloss

Author, 92

BACK
NEXT

View All

Corbis

I was naturally moved by the death of my cousin, probably the best writer of novels at the end of the 20th century in America. I first met Louis in New York after the Army; he wasn't the only person I knew there at the time, but he was the only one I wanted to talk to. We were related, of course: we shared a stepfather, who was a dismal person, but that was our problem, not yours. Louis was so clever on how to analyze people and was always fair. I was interested in what he thought of Brooke Astor, a person I considered to be a bore, and I suspected he did too, although he never said as much. "After all," he told me, "we are all different people." "Your loyalty does you credit," I said.

—Gore Vidal

Vidal's latest book is Snapshots in History's Glare

View the full list for "Person of the Year 2010"