Mine Enemy Grows Older

Description for MINE ENEMY GROWS OLDER by Alexander King:

For some 30 years a few hundred selfish insiders in the world of books, art and theater have kept to themselves a secret formula for regaining the zest of living when everything is so flat and stale that even profit seems unprofitable. The procedure is to corral Alexander King and get him to talk about practically anything---preferably his own fantastic safari through the world of books, art and theater. As well as the larger world of love and trouble.

MINE ENEMY GROWS OLDER is King in book form: his humor, his salt, his warmth, his capacity for coping. It is the autobiography of the last unself-conscious nonconformist.

King has done everything. He knows everybody: the giants of our time and the midgets(including the 21-inch midget whose picture he reproduced, life-size, in the days when he was an editor---one of the first---on "Life").

He speaks freely.

Even compulsive talkers prefer to listen when Alexander King tells why he wore nothing but pink ties for 30 years, or how he cured himself of drug addiction, or how a famous author once sat quietly on a shore watching him, King, drown---and why.

Or about the time when an advertising agency gave a party in honor of nine prominent illustrators responsible for the success of a big campaign. All nine of them happened to be King painting with dazzling flair under different names, addresses, and gracefully invented past histories. His singlehanded solution to the delicate problem of producing his eight alter egos in person was so ingenious that a master strategist might be forgiven for telling the story with inordinate pride. When King Tells it, it is simply an exercise in pure hilarity.