A Search for the King

London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1979. BR3 - A first UK edition hardcover book SIGNED by author on a laid in bookplate/card from the 2006 Texas Book Festival in Austin in very good condition in very good dust jacket that is mylar protected. Dust jacket has less than half inch tears with chipping on the top of the back inside flap and back top left corner, some wrinkling and chipping on the edges and corners, some foxing, old price label on the front inside flap, discoloration, and light shelf wear. Book cocked, some light smudge and stains on the page edges, light discoloration and shelf wear. Re-issue of his famous novel. First Published in Great Britain by William Heinemann Ltd in 1979. 8.75"x5.5", 179 pages. Satisfaction Guaranteed. Eugene Luther Gore Vidal 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 was a Democratic Party politician who twice sought elected office; first to the United States House of Representatives (New York, 1960), then to the U.S. Senate (California, 1982). As a political commentator and essayist, Vidal's principal subject was the history of the United States and its society, especially how the 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 public intellectual, Gore Vidal's topical debates on sex, politics, and religion with other intellectuals and writers occasionally turned into quarrels with the likes of William F. Buckley Jr. and Norman Mailer. Vidal thought all men and women are potentially bisexual. 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. His third novel, The City and the Pillar (1948), offended the literary, political, and moral sensibilities of conservative book reviewers, the plot being about a dispassionately presented male homosexual relationship. In the historical novel genre, Vidal re-created the imperial world of Julian the Apostate (r. AD 361-63) in Julian (1964). Julian was the Roman emperor who used general religious toleration to re-establish pagan polytheism to counter the political subversion of Christian monotheism. In social satire, Myra Breckinridge (1968) explores the mutability of gender role and sexual orientation as being social constructs established by social mores. In Burr (1973) and Lincoln (1984), the protagonist is presented as "A Man of the People" and as "A Man" in a narrative exploration of how the public and private facets of personality affect the national politics of the United States. . Signed. First UK Edition. Hard Cover. Very Good/Very Good. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall.