My Search for Warren Harding

By: Robert Plunket

Narrated by: Robert Plunket

An exhilarating, brutal, comedic masterpiece—an American classic that will “leave you so giddy you’ll go and kick sand in somebody’s face.” (Houston Post)

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, “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 29th 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 audio, a hysterical, guffaw-inducing punchline around every corner, Weiner reaches new lows of humiliation and self-delusion.

©1983, 2023 Robert Plunket (P)2023 New Directions Publishing Corp.

This is a great comic novel

This great, perfect comic novel starts out a little slow. But soon it’s clear that we are in the hands of a brilliant funny writer and the book gets going and is a great joy. The writer’s control of tone is amazing. He has created a great protagonist. And the author reads it perfectly - he has exactly the right voice for it. I was sorry when it ended. And be sure to listen to the very thoughtful foreword / afterword at the end by Danzy Senna.

A really funny book

Those who are looking for a truly funny, sharp edged book will find themselves satisfied by the most non-woke work of the 1980s. The author’s reading makes it all ring true.

Mistake

Boring and uninteresting. I kept waiting for something interesting to happen and the story to finally catch, but it never did. The leaden and labored reading adds to the negative experience.