Palimpsest; A Memoir

New York: Random House, 1995. First Edition. First Printing. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. 25 cm, 435 pages, illustrated with 32 pages of plates, index. Signed by the author, Gore Vidal, on the title page. DJ is in a plastic sleeve. Eugene Luther Gore Vidal (born Eugene Louis Vidal, October 3, 1925 - July 31, 2012) was an American writer and public intellectual known for his epigrammatic wit, patrician manner, and polished style of writing. Vidal was born into a political family; his maternal grandfather, Thomas Pryor Gore, served as United States senator from Oklahoma (1907-1921 and 1931-1937). Vidal himself twice sought office-unsuccessfully-as a Democratic Party candidate, first in 1960 to the United States House of Representatives (for New York), and later in 1982 to the U.S. Senate (for California). As a political commentator and essayist, Vidal's primary focus was the history and society of the United States, especially how a militaristic foreign policy reduced the country to a decadent empire. His political and cultural essays were published in The Nation, the New Statesman, the New York Review of Books, and Esquire magazines. As a novelist, Vidal explored the nature of corruption in public and private life. His polished and erudite style of narration readily evoked the time and place of his stories, and perceptively delineated the psychology of his characters. In social satire, Myra Breckinridge explores the mutability of gender roles and sexual orientation as being social constructs established by social mores. Memoir of the first forty years of Vidal's life, with portraits of famous friends including Tennessee Williams, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. This explosively entertaining memoir abounds in gossip, satire, and trenchant observations. Vidal's compelling narrative weaves back and forth in time, providing a whole view of the author's celebrated life, from his birth in 1925 to today, and features a cast of memorable characters-including the Kennedy family, Marlon Brando, Anais Nin, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Excerpt form a review by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt published in the New York Times: Although this memoir appears to be crowded with people, they are merely shadows of the author's experience. As he writes in his opening chapter: "I had never wanted to meet most of the people that I had met and the fact that I never got to know most of them took dedication and steadfastness on my part. By choice and luck, my life has been spent reading other people's books and making sentences for my own. More to the point, if you have known one person you have known them all. Of course, I am not so sure that I have known even one person well, but, as the Greeks sensibly believed, should you get to know yourself, you will have penetrated as much of the human mystery as anyone need ever know." The only question left unanswered by this sinuously written gossip fest is how completely the author has accomplished this task.