June 14th: Robert Plunket in conversation with Amy Robinson
Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, Robert Plunket will discuss his new book My Search For Warren Harding with Amy Robinson.
This event will take place live at 192 Books at 192 10th Avenue, between 21st and 22nd street, on Wednesday, June 14th at 7 PM ET. Seating is on a first come, first served basis.
Robert Plunket — My Search For Warren Harding, Foreword by Danzy Senna (Published by New Directions, 2023)
When My Search for Warren Harding, Robert Plunket’s glittering story of literary sleuthing and deceit, first appeared in 1983, it garnered immediate and far-reaching acclaim. Frank Conroy at the Washington Post exclaimed, “The author pulled me in so deftly, moved me up an escalating scale of sly hyperbole so cunningly, that after a hundred pages, I seemed to have turned over the keys, so to speak, of my nervous system”; Florence King at the Dallas Times Herald called it “The most exciting event in American letters for a very long time: a momentous book.” More recently, though long out of print, it was canonized in The Guardian’s “1000 Novels Everyone Must Read,” ranked by the Washington Post as one of the top five books of “great American comic fiction,” and praised by Michael Leone in the Los Angeles Review of Books as “a classic picaresque novel in the tradition of Cervantes.”
Set against the fading light of early-1980s Hollywood, our deeply flawed, bigoted, closeted antihero Elliot Weiner is a historian—Harvard BA, Columbia PhD—with a passion for Morris dancing and Warren Harding, “the shallowest President in history.” After Weiner receives a research grant to write a book on the tumultuous life of Harding, he gets wind of a trunkful of the twenty-ninth president’s bawdy billets-doux that is rumored to be fiercely guarded by his ancient mistress Rebekah Kinney on her declining Hollywood Hills estate. Nothing and no one can stand in the way of Weiner getting his paws on the treasure, and along the way, as the words dance across the page, a hysterical, guffaw-inducing punchline around every corner, Weiner reaches new lows of humiliation and self-delusion.
Robert Plunket was born in Greenville, Texas, in 1945 but raised in Havana and Mexico City. After college he moved to New York and embarked on a successful career as a waiter and office temp, then moved to Sarasota, Florida, where he became Mr. Chatterbox, the gossip columnist for Sarasota Magazine. Plunket is also the author of the novel Love Junkie. He has written for many publications, including Healthy Aging, This Week in Ft. Myers Beach, and Sandbars and Sonnets: The Southwest Florida Poetry Review. He is currently retired and lives in a trailer park in Englewood, Florida, where he enjoys collecting old quilts and raising succulents from scratch.
Amy Robinson began her show business career acting with Robert Plunket at Sarah Lawrence College and La Mama Etc. In 1977 she turned to film producing with an adaptation of Ann Beattie’s novel Chilly Scenes of Winter. She was put under pressure by Mr. Plunket to continue producing movies in order to provide him with acting vehicles. Some of the movies which she produced that he appeared in are: After Hours, Drive Me Crazy, White Palace and Autumn in New York.