"I reread and study Auntie Mame like a hilarious, glamorous bible where, among other wise lessons, one learns that true sophistication and innocence are two halves of the same glittering coin."--Charles Busch, author of The Tale of the Allergist's Wife and Vampire Lesbians of Sodom

"Auntie Mame is the American Alice in Wonderland. It is also, incidentally, one of the most important books in my life. Its witty Wildean phrases ring in my mind, and its flamboyant characters still enamor me. Like Tennessee Williams, Patrick Dennis caught the boldness, vitality, and iridescent theatricality of modern American personality. In Mame's mercurial metamorphoses we see American optimism and self-invention writ large."--Camille Paglia, author of Sexual Personae

"Mame Dennis is the grande dame of grand dames and I, for one, am thrilled that she's back among us. She is still hilarious, sparkling, and utterly indestructible despite the best efforts of time, neglect, and Lucille Ball."--Joe Keenan, Emmy-Winning Writer/Producer for Frasier, author of Blue Heaven and Putting on the Ritz

"Auntie Mame is a unique literary achievement--a brilliant novel disguised as a lightweight piece of fluff. Every page sparkles with wit, style and--though Mame would cringe at the thought--high moral purpose. Let's hope Patrick Dennis is finally recognized for what he is: One of the great comedic writers of the 20th century."--Robert Plunket, author of Love Junkie

Patrick Dennis can cause puberty. I was eleven or twelve when I first came upon his novels in a New Jersey public library, and his tales of life among the deliriously sophisticated made me yearn desperately for adulthood or, at the very least, a strong cocktail and an 8-inch cigarette holder. Auntie Mame is undoubtedly Mr. Dennis' best-known and most-acclaimed work, and its title character has become an archetype: Auntie Mame is America's diabolical answer to Mary Poppins.

The novel was originally constructed as a series of short stories centering on Mame, but a savvy editor suggested linking the vignettes with a device thieved from that most sedate and suburban of publications, the Reader's Digest (I learned of this strategy from Eric Myers' comprehensive and essential biography of Patrick Dennis, Uncle Mame). In the Digest, individuals would often recall a Most Unforgettable Character, usually some beloved spinster who shared her secrets of canning peaches, or a strict yet caring Latin teacher exposing his students to the glories of Catullus. Patrick Dennis gleefully and maliciously subverted this cozy format, as his Most Unforgettable Character is Mame Dennis, a sparkling, chain-smoking, often inebriated Manhattan socialite for whom 9 A.M. is considered "the Middle of the Night." The novel is narrated by Patrick Dennis himself, who is delivered, as a ten-year-old orphan, into his Auntie Mame's terrifyingly overdecorated Beekman Place duplex, where he arrives amid a jabbering cocktail party, the guest list featuring a couple where "the man looked like a woman, and the woman, except for her tweed skirt, was almost a perfect Ramon Novarro." After much giddy confusion, young Patrick reports that his Aunt "put her arms around me and kissed me, and I knew I was safe."

Part of Auntie Mame's considerable charm lies in its blithe irreverence toward potential family angst: Patrick never bemoans his orphanhood, and psychotherapy is properly viewed as a trend, along with Japanese floral arranging and bobbed hair. Auntie Mame becomes a wicked child's fantasy parent: she's rich, foul-mouthed, and impossibly glamorous, like a rowdy, roller-skating Glinda, waving her wand to provide houseboys, satin sheets, and the occasional Rolls-Royce. Mame behaves like an actress with an endless repertory of crowd-pleasing roles. In the course of the novel, Mame becomes, among other pursuits, a curtseying Southern belle, a loden-caped vaguely Anglo-Irish authoress, and a sari-clad swami. Her constant variations in personality, accent, and career are dictated primarily by a lust for an ever-changing wardrobe; for Mame, hats are destiny. Mame glories in self-invention. This makes her both a sterling influence on a child's imagination and a role model for drag queens everywhere. Mame defines the triumph of drag, for every sexual persuasion: the prospect of a new hair color, tiara, or pair of jodhpurs can symbolize hope itself.

When Auntie Mame was first published in 1955, it became an immediate bestseller, even before the almost universally adoring reviews rolled in; the book must have seemed like an ideal tonic to the Donna Reed torpor of the era. The fifties established the American suburbs as a brand of family paradise, while Auntie Mame was a celebration of Manhattan uproar, of sleek penthouses, and people like Mame's best friend Vera Charles, "a famous actress from Pittsburgh who spoke with such Mayfair elegance that you could barely understand a word she said." Mame Dennis, perhaps swathed in Chanel chiffon with "just a suggestion of sables," was the intoxicatingly perfumed antidote to Mamie Eisenhower, in her dowdy shirtwaists and neat bangs. If Auntie Mame has an enemy, it is the stuffy, aggressively middlebrow folks like the Upsons, a clan with whom she briefly tangles. "The Upsons lived like every family in America wants to live -- not rich, but well-to-do. They had two of everything: two addresses, the flat on Park and a house in Connecticut; two cars, a Buick sedan and a Ford station wagon; two children, a boy and a girl; two servants, man and maid; two clubs, town and country; and two interests, money and position."

If Mame has any agenda, she is pro-pleasure and anti-pretention. Occasionally to young Patrick's dismay, she verbally demolishes a variety of snobs and bigots; she's a classic leftie activist in emeralds and Dior. While the book takes bantering pot-shots at anti-Semites and Confederate racists, the real venom is reserved for crimes of taste; the Upson home is "very Quaint, very Country, very Colonial. There were carriage lamps, ratchet lamps, tole lamps, and lamps made out of butter churns, coffee mills, and apothecary jars." Mame can tolerate anything except all of the "bed warmers, old bellows, brass trivets, and gay samplers hung on the walls with Spy cartoons, hunting prints, yellowed maps, and prim daguerreotypes." To Mame, conventional thinking and Early American décor are a prison; she advocates total sexual freedom, world travel, and "the feverish excitement of the creative career!" Mame believes that life must be art, and that the planet is her audience.

Auntie Mame's author, as a canny satirist, does not spare his title character: Mame is both mocked and adored for her own considerable affectations and theatrical dementia. She is vain and fearful of aging, she dallies with younger cads, and she loses her fortune in the Crash. Luckily, after she takes a mild stab at gainful employment, Mame's creator nimbly provides her with a worshipful millionaire husband and a subsequently gilded widowhood. Patrick Dennis, the author, loves Mame but never insists that we take her too seriously; she is an artful confection, a gorgeously crafted bauble. This sort of airy comedy of manners is one of literature's most notoriously daunting forms; divine creatures can easily grow tiresome. Mr. Dennis succeeds by virtue of speed and elegant savagery. Auntie Mame is a drunken fairy tale, and Mame is a Cinderella with many princes and an independent income.

Over the years, Auntie Mame has been adapted into a hit Broadway play, a subsequent, equally successful Hollywood movie, a blockbuster stage musical, and an epically dreadful musical movie, starring Lucille Ball in her waning years. This last, disastrous "Mame" illustrates a dangerous homogenization of the novel. Lucy plays Mame as a figure of inspirational uplift, as a beaming, gracious lady of quality, with enough soft focus to satisfy even Loretta Young. Rosalind Russell plays Mame in the earlier, nonmusical film, and even she gets more than a tad sanctimonious; Auntie Mame should never become a tenderhearted force of nature, bravely molding her tremulous nephew and dabbing away a tear as he acquires his first pair of long pants. These multimedia versions of Mame sentimentalize the novel, and Mame actually becomes a sexless, homespun Reader's Digest heroine.

Patrick Dennis is the least soggy writer imaginable. His subsequent novels, many of them also bestsellers, create a blissfully poisonous panorama of American society, from the gin-drenched twenties through the shearling-vested sixties. My favorites include Genius, an all-stops-out portrait of a bombastic, visionary, lunatic movie director, an Orson Welles-scale figure hitting the skids in Mexico and creating an "artistic," independently financed epic out of sheer gall. I'm also very fond of Tony, a scabrous look at a career social climber, and How Firm aFoundation, a yummy evisceration of a Kennedy-like clan in financial turmoil. There is an intriguing moral ambivalence to all of Mr. Dennis' novels; he is helplessly attracted to outsize personalities, but he recognizes their madness. Many of his books are framed like Auntie Mame; the flamboyant divas are viewed by a more staid, cautious outsider.

Patrick Dennis led a divided life, as a devoted husband and father and as a sexual adventurer, as a madcap novelist and -- fascinatingly, following his years of success -- as an anonymous butler at the estate of Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald's, among others. Mr. Dennis is the artist as concierge; he enjoyed access to the rich and famous, but kept a skillful distance. He is, above all else, a brilliant social observer and a detail addict, in a tradition encompassing everyone from Edith Wharton to Tom Wolfe. Mame refers to a family as "a lit-tle B. Altman's -- the more expensive floors, mind you," and during World War II she declares that she "sold more bonds than any woman who's ever worked El Morocco." When I first read these sentences, I had no idea what B. Altman's or El Morocco was, but I instantly got the point: Patrick Dennis has a passion for the precise contents of an upscale picnic hamper, and the exact inflections of a Dixie bore. His glee is his art.

When discussing Auntie Mame, that hideously abused and overworked term "camp" inevitably rears its rhinestoned head. Camp has become an extremely nebulous commodity, and the word is used to describe everything from a Cher infomercial to anything that makes a heterosexual male uncomfortable. "Camp" is often invoked dismissively, to imply that a work is not merely lightweight but simpering and appreciated only by a deadeningly ironic cult. Mame Dennis is certainly camp, but of a higher order; she is the gleaming Deco hood ornament on the camp roadster. She is high camp because Patrick Dennis doesn't pander and because his creation displays wit and intelligence. The leading figures in Mr. Dennis' later books are often darker and more complex. Mame bursts forth as a youthful treat. Mame is camp at its frivolous best -- the triumph of fantasy over dreary common sense. She joins a pantheon that includes Judith Bliss, a semiretired actress with a penchant for daily melodrama in Noël Coward's Hay Fever, and Mrs. Stitch, the dithering London society queen in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, who at one point pilots her car down into the subway.

As a New Jersey adolescent, I was most impressed by Patrick Dennis' reverence for style. In Auntie Mame, once Patrick reaches college, he joins with friends united by their soulful appreciation of the charm, nonchalance, and wingtips of Fred Astaire; whenever a member encounters any challenging social situation, he asks himself, "What would Fred Astaire do?" In New Jersey, personality tended to be frowned upon, and whiplash tap-dancing would have been considered deeply suspect. Sameness ruled, and Patrick Dennis was a beacon, guiding me toward the hoped-for depravity of Manhattan. At that time, during the 1970s, Mr. Dennis' books were already falling out of print; his output was deemed hopelessly dated, disposable froth. I didn't care, and I was right: marvelous comic writing will always endure, and the novels grow ever more valuable as sheer social reportage.

Like most rabid Dennis acolytes (Dennizons?), for years I felt furtive and alone. Once I attended college, I realized that I was merely one of a slavish horde. The most unlikely people proved to be devotees, clutching their battered paperbacks of The Joyous Season or Love and Mrs. Sergeant. Perhaps the most cherished prize was a mint copy of Little Me, Mr. Dennis' landmark photo-biography of an invented, talentless movie star named Belle Poitrine. Patrick Dennis is long overdue for a proper renaissance.

I hope that this fresh edition of Auntie Mame will only begin a novice reader's acquaintance with the master. Auntie Mame is a classic, but the rest of the Dennis shelf deserves equal applause. I think of Mame as the most scintillating hostess, welcoming readers everywhere to the delectable Dennis geography. As her nephew recalls, in describing his relationship to this impossible, irresistible figure, "It was love, and the experience was unique."