VIDAL, Gore. Myra Breckinridge.

VIDAL, Gore. Myra Breckinridge.A Transgender Actress in Hollywood VIDAL, Gore. Myra Breckinridge. London: Anthony Blond. 1968. 8vo. Original black cloth, spine lettered in gilt, in the dust jacket priced 35s. net to the front flap, lettered in white and yellow; pp. 205, [3]; very slight spotting to upper and fore edges, jacket rubbed and nicked to spine tips and edges; a near fine copy in a very good jacket; title page signed by the author in black. An uncommon signed first UK

A Transgender Actress in Hollywood

VIDAL, Gore. Myra Breckinridge. London: Anthony Blond. 1968.

8vo. Original black cloth, spine lettered in gilt, in the dust-jacket priced 35s. net to the front flap, lettered in white and yellow; pp. 205, [3]; very slight spotting to upper and fore-edges, jacket rubbed and nicked to spine tips and edges; a near-fine copy in a very good jacket; title-page signed by the author in black.

An uncommon signed first UK edition, first printing of Vidal’s landmark novel, is-sued with authorised excisions from the American text and carrying the author’s sardonic note regarding his adaptation to the ‘high moral climate that envelops the British Isles’.

One of the most provocative and widely discussed novels of the 1960s, and the author’s own favourite among his works, Myra Breckinridge is a flamboyant assault on the sexual and social orthodoxies of post-war America. Presented in the form of the diary of its transgender heroine – formerly Myron Breckinridge – the novel follows Myra’s arrival in Hollywood, where her project of social and sexual transformation unfolds amid the glamour, artifice, and kitsch of the film industry. Comic, irreverent, and subversive, the novel antici-pated debates about gender and identity that would only later enter the cultural mainstream. Although the work was published uncut by Little, Brown in the United States, Vidal’s London publisher, Heinemann, declined to issue it, ‘fearing that an association with the book would affect Heinemann’s reputation in a way that would damage sales’ (Kaplan).

Anthony Blond, ‘a smaller but less timid publisher’ (ibid.), subsequently acquired the book, on condition that Vidal ‘would respond satisfactorily to pages of objections raised by its own lawyers, some of which had to do with obscenity, some with libel’. Vidal made the requisite alterations and cuts, adding a characteristically tart note to the British edition: ‘Wanting in every way to adapt to the high moral climate that envelops the British Isles, the author has allowed certain excisions to be made in the American text.’

The novel is dedicated to Christopher Isherwood, who had dedicated A Single Man to Vidal four years earlier.

Joshi 25.b.; Stanton, p.11. See Kaplan, Gore Vidal: A Biography (1999).

SKU: 2123717