Palimpsest: A Memoir

Description

This is a memoir of the first 40 years of Gore Vidal's life, ranging back and forth across a rich history. He spent his childhood in Washington DC, 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 '40s and '50s; sex in an age of promiscuity; and a campaign for Congress in 1960. His 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.

Gore Vidal has received the National Book Award, written numerous novels, short stories, plays and essays. He has been a political activist and as Democratic candidate for Congress from upstate New York, he received the most votes of any Democrat in a half-century.

'An engrossing and beguiling read. Admirably candid, refreshingly indiscreet, intelligent and full of wit, it is also startlingly original...And unequivocal triumph.' William Boyd, DAILY TELEGRAPH BOOKS OF THE YEAR 'He does not narrate his life: he revies it. The result is something quite novel and wonderfully appealing, a critical biography of himself...Vidal's life might even be his greatest work.' INDEPENDENT 'Wonderfully entertaining. You want the high-level political gossip? You get it here... it offers all the zing of a Dry Martini without the danger of getting drunk.' DAILY TELEGRAPH 'PALIMPSEST is a tremendous read, down and dirty from start to finish. It is also a proud and serious and truthful book...' SUNDAY TIMES 'On reaching his three score and ten, Vidal has produced this elegantly observed, ineffably sad- and at times hysterically funny- memoir.' SUNDAY EXPRESS 'Throughout the book we find him warm and generous among the poisoned arrows he also flings...' THE TIMES 'This palimpsest, however much scored out and scribbled over, and however much a keening for the golden gone to dust, is nonetheless a record of the transmutation, of the base into gold, that is the raw stuff of literature...' LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS 'The most entertaining fagiography since THE ORTON DIARIES...' Philip Kerr, SUNDAY TIMES BOOKS OF THE YEAR '...a book that is far more than a memoir; bawdy catalogue, family saga, political history, elegy. And one of the year's best books.' Guy Reynolds, EVENING STANDARD BOOKS OF THE YEAR 'There are passages from Gore Vidal's PALIMPSEST which expose that Mount Rushmore mind like nothing else he has ever written.' Melvyn Bragg, SUNDAY TIMES BOOKS OF THE YEAR '...matches some of the great literary memoirs of childhood, such as Nabakov's SPEAK, MEMORY...' FINANCIAL TIMES