The American People, Volume 1: Search for My Heart

Kramer, Larry

ISBN 10: 0374104395 / ISBN 13: 9780374104399

Published by FarRar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 2015

About this Item

Hardcover in jacket, Near Fine with trace wear only. Signed and datred by Kramer on title page,

Seller Inventory # 031751

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The American People, Volume 1: Search for My Heart
• Publisher: FarRar, Straus & Giroux, New York
• Publication Date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374104395
• ISBN 13: 9780374104399
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Signed: Signed by Author

About this title

Synopsis

The long-awaited new novel by America's master playwright and activist-a radical reimagining of our history and our hopes and fears

Forty years in the making, The American People embodies Larry Kramer's vision of his beloved and accursed homeland. As the founder of ACT UP and the author of Faggots and The Normal Heart, Kramer has decisively affected American lives and letters. Here, as only he can, he tells the heartbreaking and heroic story of one nation under a plague, contaminated by greed, hate, and disease yet host to transcendent acts of courage and kindness.

In this magisterial novel's sweeping first volume, which runs up to the 1950s, we meet prehistoric monkeys who spread a peculiar virus, a Native American shaman whose sexual explorations mutate into occult visions, and early English settlers who live as loving same-sex couples only to fall victim to the forces of bigotry. George Washington and Alexander Hamilton revel in unexpected intimacies, and John Wilkes Booth's motives for assassinating Abraham Lincoln are thoroughly revised. In the twentieth century, the nightmare of history deepens as a religious sect conspires with eugenicists, McCarthyites, and Ivy Leaguers to exterminate homosexuals, and the AIDS virus begins to spread. Against all this, Kramer sets the tender story of a middle-class family outside Washington, D.C., trying to get along in the darkest of times.

The American People is a work of ribald satire, prophetic anger, and dazzling imagination. It is an encyclopedic indictment written with outrageous love.

About the Author

Larry Kramer (1935-2020) was an award-winning playwright and author, and a celebrated public health and gay rights advocate. He wrote the critically-acclaimed, Tony Award-winning play The Normal Heart (and subsequent Emmy Award-winning HBO television adaptation), the Academy Award–nominated screenplay adaptation of D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, the bestselling novel Faggots, and the satirical two-volume novel The American People (Search for My Heart and The Brutality of Fact).

A pioneering AIDS activist, he cofounded the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in 1982 and founded ACT UP in 1987. Kramer won numerous awards for his plays and received the 2013 PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for a Master American Dramatist.