[1] The City and the Pillar is significant because it is recognized as the first post-World War II novel whose gay protagonist is portrayed in a sympathetic manner and is not killed off at the end of the story for defying social norms.

It is also recognized as one of the "definitive war-influenced gay novels", being one of the few books of its period dealing directly with male homosexuality.

When his best friend Bob Ford, one year his senior, is about to leave high school, the two take a camping trip into the woods.

One of the bellboys, Leaper, whose advances he has spurned previously, introduces him to the circle around the mid-thirties Hollywood actor Ronald Shaw, who immediately takes interest in Jim.

In the meantime, World War II has started in Europe and Paul and Jim are determined to go to New York to enlist in the Army.

Ronald has been forced to marry a lesbian by studio executives to uphold his public image and tries unsuccessfully to become a stage actor.

[4] The major theme of the novel is how prejudice creates the object of its own hatred, and in the process damages not only the oppressed, but also society at large.

The origin of society's perverse attitude to sex is subtly traced to religion (both by the epigraph opening the novel, which is the end of the biblical passage describing the destruction of Sodom, and by remarks scattered in the narrative by different characters, who voice Vidal's idea that humans are naturally bisexual, and this natural inclination is perverted by cultural superstructures).

Vidal set out to break the mould of novels that up until The City and the Pillar depicted homosexuals as transvestites, lonely bookish boys, or feminine.

Vidal purposefully makes his protagonist a strong athlete to challenge superstitions, stereotypes, and prejudices about sex in the United States.

[5] Two additional themes identified by Dennis Bolin are the foolishness and destructiveness of wishing for something that can never be and to waste one's life dwelling on the past, the second of which is reinforced by the novel's epigraph from the Book of Genesis 19:26 "But his wife looked back from behind him and she became a pillar of salt.

Vidal was blacklisted after releasing The City and the Pillar to the extent that no major newspaper or magazine would review any of his novels for six years.

[15] The City and the Pillar is considered by Anthony Slide to be one of only four familiar gay novels of the first half of the twentieth century in English.

The other three novels are Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, Carson McCullers' Reflections in a Golden Eye, and Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms.

In this version, Vidal removed melodramatic narrative, passages of introspection, and politically offensive language and strove to clarify the intended theme of the work.

[citation needed] In the 2022 homoerotic film Dino at the Beach which takes place in the 1960s, the main character is reading a 1950s paperback printing of the novel.