Horace Bixby

Relentlessly politically incorrect, Horace Bixby manages to skewer Americans of all stripes—old and young, fat and thin, gay and straight, New Age and conservative—but all are so affectionately portrayed that we don’t mind. The bawdy, farcical plot revolves around Horace’s crusade for justice and eventual campaign for president, intertwined with the gossipy doings at his twin sister Hortense’s Florida trailer park. The eponymous Horace is a pompous, offensive boor who wears loud ties and has hair sprouting from his ears—and who we come to love because he unerringly points out that the emperor has no clothes. The book closes with a transcendent, almost prayerful sequence of surprising sweetness that reveals the inner longings of each of the unlikely characters. Thus, Horace Bixby joins the ranks of other classic American picaresque novels—think Tom Robbins meets Kurt Vonnegut, with the blessing of Samuel Clemens.

Horace Bixby is the creation of R.F. Seabury, who not only looks remarkably like Mark Twain, but who shares Twain’s gift for unvarnished Americana and for political satire with heart. A magnetic raconteur, R.F. Seabury is a true American “character” himself, with a resonant voice and an infectious laugh—an interviewer’s dream. After his formal education ended with the ninth grade, he spent the years that followed as a Green Beret, country storeowner, scrap metal dealer, trucker, boat builder, and commercial fisherman. He currently owns and operates a bamboo farm in Sarasota, Florida, where he has lived for the past seven years in a sixteen-foot Airstream Bambi.