My Search for Warren Harding
  • Published: 6 May 2025
  • ISBN: 9780241707999
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $22.99
Categories:

My Search for Warren Harding

Formats & editions
Paperback
6 May 2025
EBook
6 Feb 2025
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A breakneck comic tour-de-force set in 1980s Hollywood, about one man's quest to get his hands on a box of bawdy love letters

Elliot Weiner is a historian 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 Harding’s tumultuous life, he gets wind of a trunkful of the twenty-ninth president’s billets-doux, rumoured to be guarded by his ancient mistress on her declining Hollywood Hills estate. There's no depth to which he won't stoop, no moral boundary he won't traverse and no preposterous scheme he won't machinate to get at them.

First published in 1983, My Search for Warren Harding garnered immediate acclaim and was described by the Los Angeles Review of Books as 'a classic picaresque novel in the tradition of Cervantes'; Robert Plunket’s original fans included Amy Sedaris, Larry David and Madonna. In this deliciously bonkers novel, The Aspern Papers meets A Confederacy of Dunces meets Sunset Boulevard meets pure, glorious, hair-raising farce.
  • Published: 6 May 2025
  • ISBN: 9780241707999
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $22.99
Categories:

Praise for My Search for Warren Harding

One of the most original comic novels of the past half century

The New Yorker

There’s a subversive thrill to reading this novel... Elliot Weiner is a snob. He’s vain, shallow and shameless. He’s lazy and untrustworthy. He’s a bitch too, quick to make an acid observation. And these are just some of the reasons why he’s a brilliant narrator. Who wouldn’t want to spend 300 pages in his company?

The Times

A satirical evisceration of the Hollywood celebrity scene... a madcap plot, and a host of vivid supporting characters

The Herald

Most of all what My Search for Warren Harding conveys is a devil-may-care, not-giving-a-damn energy that makes no concessions to taste, simply offers its manic vision to the reader and says "take it or leave it". I’ll take it

The Critic

My Search for Warren Harding is essentially a picaresque novel and, as in all such works, we meet with grotesques. I am reminded of Lolita. A nasty person with a fancy prose style teaches us about America... Weiner, in the grand tradition of the comic unreliable narrator, reveals himself to be a half-insane monster... That’s the thing about a certain kind of bitchiness: it’s rarely dull... Exquisite

The Spectator
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