Palimpsest, a Memoir

Abacus, London, 1996. reprint. Softcover. Very Good Condition/Good. Illustrator: Photographic. VIII, 440 pages, includes index, text illustrated with black-and-white photographs (32 pages). Translucent illustrated dust jacket laid over illustrated softcover binding. The dustjacket has a couple of short splits across the top edge. age toning of the page edges. "I am not my own subject," Gore Vidal used to say. But now, surprisingly, he has turned his wit and elegant storytelling gift to a candid memoir of the first 40 years of his life. Palimpsest is written from the vantage point of the Vidal's library in his villa on the Italian coast. As visitors come and go, his memory ranges back and forth across a rich history. -- front fold over blurb 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. Size: Trade Paperback. The book is a secondhand book with reading creases to the spine, and darkening of the page edges, but is otherwise clean, and free of annotation.. Please refer to accompanying picture (s). Illustrator: Photographic. Quantity Available: 1. Shipped Weight: Under 1 kilo. Category: Biography & Autobiography; Literature & Literary. ISBN: 0349108005. ISBN/EAN: 9780349108001. Inventory No: 0245824. . 9780349108001