The Unimportance of Being Oscar

The Unimportance of Being Oscar is a 1968 memoir by writer/pianist/radio personality/actor Oscar Levant. The book is known for Oscar's laconic witticisms, such as "everyone in Hollywood is gay, except Gabby Hayes — and that's because he is a transvestite."

Levant writes about his family, his mental health issues, his musical career, politics, and more in typically amusing style. The book is full of observations of and encounters with the famous, including George and Ira Gershwin, Benny Goodman, George Bernard Shaw, Virgil Thomson, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, W. S. Gilbert, T.S. Eliot, Moss Hart, Alexander Woolcott, Noel Coward, Somerset Maugham, Dorothy Parker, Gertrude Stein, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson, John F. Kennedy, Gore Vidal, Christopher Isherwood, Paul Bowles, Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand and many others.

Details

The title of this autobiography is a pun on the title of the Oscar Wilde play The Importance of Being Earnest.

gollark: No, but you can use accursed streaming base conversion algorithms™ probably.

gollark: I had a paper on generating digits of things like that using a generalized base conversion algorithm on infinite lazy streams, 'twas very weird.

gollark: The Wikipedia article explains how you can attain things from that.

gollark: Xylophone Yttrium Zoo, India.

gollark: Either by starting at the *maximum* length for everything and seeing where it can be shifted to be smaller, or starting at a more optimistic one and trying to make it actually work

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