In a 1962 review in Esquire magazine of Robert Gover's best-selling first novel, One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding, Gore Vidal quoted Dwight D. Eisenhower, distressed at the immorality of the time, about why certain books sell so well: “Filth sells.” But Vidal went on to describe Gover's novel “as truly moral,” taking “the hardest look at American morality since Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature (1923).”
        Gover's novel is about many varieties of hypocrisy – political, economic, sexual, racial. But it is also sexy and hilarious; written in a kind of golden age of American fiction of the '50s and '60s, it can take its rightful place among the American literary pantheon of the time: Henry Miller, Ken Kesey, Terry Southern, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, Jack Kerouac, J. P. Donleavy, Warren Miller – all of whom helped bring down with laughter the debilitating American uptightness of the time, its terror of economic democracy, of sex, of race, of language itself! In fact, when we look around us today, it would seem that the time may be ripe for another such bring down!
        One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding sold nearly a million copies and launched Robert Gover onto a literary career which has been a roller coaster ride of meteoric ascent and plunging dips. Along the way, he hobnobbed with an astonishing array of the leading characters and artists of the period – Jim Morrison, Hunter S. Thompson, Bob Dylan, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, Raymond Carver… ; he also found himself in clashes with a couple of powers behind the scene – Sam Goldwyn and Michael Korda, to name two.
        Korda, in fact, to whom Google attributes the quote, “An ounce of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition,” seems to have derailed Gover's ascent when a publishing merger orphaned Gover's newest novel which had already been featured on the front page of Publisher's Weekly as a best-seller to-be.
        Gover's memoir, Confessions of a Dissident Writer, a hefty part of which is excerpted here, gives a glimpse from the inside of the heady life that he found himself living, of roads taken and not taken (e.g., turning down an offer to tour Europe with Jim Morrison and write a book about the experience), of successes and defeats and the acquisition along the way of self-knowledge and understanding.
        Personally, I remember reading One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding in 1962 as an 18-year-old, and I would be hard pressed to say what has been more thrilling: discovering that novel then and feeling that my world was being opened wide for me for a look at its reality; or reading this memoir now, decades later, and experiencing the pleasure and enlightenment of an intimate conversation with the man who lived it.
        Of one thing, however, I feel certain: Anyone interested in American literary, cultural, and social history of the mid- to late twentieth century will find this an enthralling read.

—Thomas E. Kennedy, Ph.D.
Author of The Copenhagen Quartet
and Riding the Dog: A Look Back at America