Palimpsest. Gore Vidal, A Memoir.

Cover Type: Hardcover
Book Condition: Very Good
Jacket Condition: No Jacket
Publisher: Andre Deutsch
Publisher Place: London
Publisher Year: 1995
Edition: First Edition

Description: 402 pages. Book is in Very good condition throughout. 'I Am Not My Own Subject', Gore Vidal Used To Say. But Now, Surprisingly, He Has Turned His Wit And Elegant Story Telling Gifts To A Candid Memoir Of The First Forty Years.

Publishers Description: "I am not my own subject," Gore Vidal used to say. But now, surprisingly, he has turned his wit and elegant storytelling gifts to a candid memoir of the first forty years of his life. Palimpsest is written from the vantage point of Vidals library in his villa on the Italian coast. As visitors come and go, his memory ranges back and forth across a rich history. Vidals childhood was spent in Washington, D.C., in the household of his grandfather, the blind senator from Oklahoma, T. P. Gore, and in the various domestic situations of his complicated and exasperating mother, Nina. Then come schooldays at St. Albans and Exeter; the army; life as a literary wunderkind in New York, London, Rome, and Paris in the forties and fifties; sex in an age of promiscuity; and a campaign for Congress in 1960. Vidals famous skills as a raconteur, his forthrightness, and his wicked wit are brilliantly at work in these recollections of a difficult family, talented friends, and interesting enemies. The cast includes Tennessee Williams, the Kennedys, Eleanor Roosevelt, Truman Capote, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, Christopher Isherwood, Jack Kerouac, Jane and Paul Bowles, Santayana, Anais Nin, Norman Mailer, Leonard Bernstein, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, among others. Beautifully rendered anecdotes are intermixed with meditations on writing, history, acting, and politics. Perhaps most surprising is the leitmotif of a great, lost love. "A memoir is how one remembers ones own life," Vidal says, "while an autobiography is history." Palimpsest is a true story, but also an extraordinary work of literary imagination.

ISBN: 0233988912