In The Season of Comfort (1949), Vidal made his first significant stylistic experiments — involving elaborate but not completely successful use of stream of consciousness and including a chapter in which two characters are followed simultaneously on facing pages.

Messiah (1954, revised 1965) is an earlier use by Vidal of the pseudomemoir, the most congenial mode for his style — strong on wit and weak on character development. Messiah is an intense work describing a religious visionary with the satanic plan of seducing the world into mass suicide. The Judgment of Paris (1952) is another earlier stylistic experiment, this one combining (as Ray Lewis White has pointed out) the all-dialogue technique of Thomas Love Peacock and I. Compton-Burnett with the direct address to the reader familiar from Anthony Trollope and Henry Fielding.