You probably best know our longtime writer Robert Plunket as Mr. Chatterbox, the crochety gossip columnist who for decades delighted readers with his keen and often comic observations of Sarasota social life. These days, he’s become something else—a literary star.

Earlier this month, New Directions Publishing reissued Plunket’s 1983 debut novel, My Search for Warren Harding. After it was first published, the novel was named one of the top five books of comic American fiction by The Washington Post. But it fell out of print, and, except among a few cult followers, was largely forgotten. Now rediscovered, it’s being called “the funniest novel you’ve never heard of” (Jacobin) and “one of the best, and most invigorating books ... in years, and certainly the funniest” (The Paris Review). The New York Times just sung Plunket’s praises in a piece titled “Taking a Late Life Victory Lap, Thanks to His Novel’s ‘Lunatic Energy,’” and Plunket is doing readings at Manhattan bookstores as I write this.

Few writers will ever achieve such recognition—and it comes to even fewer at the age of 78. It’s exciting for those of us who know and love Bob to see the literary world embrace him—but here in Sarasota, we’re also asking, “What took so long?” After almost 40 years of reading his work in Sarasota Magazine, we already knew that Robert Plunket is a genius.

In 1985, Bob, who had just moved here from New York, walked into our conference room to meet with our owner and publisher Dan Denton and me, then the editor of the magazine. Dan had read My Search for Warren Harding and knew that Bob had just appeared in the Martin Scorsese film After Hours. (That's his voice you hear at the beginning of the film's trailer.)

“Typecasting,” Bob told us in his deadpan way. “I play a neurotic middle-aged homosexual.” We asked him if he would write a humorous piece for us and it turned out he had a big interest in homes and real estate—the backbone of Sarasota’s economy and a perennial hot topic for the magazine. He suggested a story about the upcoming Parade of Homes, in which the public was invited to tour model houses around the region. We were a little nervous (did we really want to make fun of our advertisers?), but we chose to go ahead with Bob’s story.

We shouldn’t have worried. The piece was perfect—sharp, funny and insightful, and without a trace of the mean-spiritedness that many so-called humor writers display. It had all the hallmarks we would come to relish in a Plunket piece: clear-eyed observation, honesty (he noted the absence of Black visitors in what was then lily-white Sarasota) and a writing style so easy to read that it seemed—but was anything but—effortless.

Most importantly, it offered an original take on the subject. After viewing miles of mirrored walls, vaulted ceilings and glitzy master baths, Bob dubbed the style “Dynasty meets suburbia.” In a characteristic ending, which embraced rather than scolded the perpetrators, he wrote, “I must say, I came away from the Parade of Homes feeling good about the future of architecture. Like so many other things these days, it is clearly in the hands of Joan Collins. And frankly, we could do a lot worse.”

Fascinated by his new hometown, Bob was soon exploring all of Sarasota’s corners. In a piece titled “The Hidden, Horrible Charms of the North Trail,” he described the dark and smoky Bahi Hut cocktail lounge as “the perfect place to plan a shady real estate deal” and noted the late, great Trail Drive-In Theater had “everything you want in a drive-in, including a flea market on Wednesday, X-rated movies on the weekend and some people selling plants from the back of a truck. And as an extra bonus, you can even watch it from your boat in the bay.”

Before Bob, our magazine (then called Clubhouse) focused on the arts, country club life and other genteel, upper-middle-class subjects. He delved deeper into the city, writing about the wrestling matches at Robarts Arena, a wedding at a bingo parlor, and a woman’s 100th birthday in a nursing home. He even talked us into doing a splashy black-and-white cover story about what he declared to be “The Party of the Year,” with “limos lined up and down the block, great clothes and a crowd so stylish, so hip, I had to keep reminding myself, ‘I’m still in Sarasota.’” That party? Riverview High School’s prom.

But he truly found his muse when he wrote “Rich and Famous in Lido Shores.” Some prominent residents of that wealthy neighborhood, known for its iconic modern architecture, had been caught bringing in sand without a permit to restore their eroding beaches, and a mini-scandal, complete with headlines in the local paper, ensued. With affectionate humor, Bob portrayed them as passion-driven characters in an epic tragicomedy: “If Shakespeare ever wrote a play about Sarasota, he would set it in Lido Shores. The place would give him plenty of opportunity to explore his favorite themes. Like Power, Ambition. Revenge. Sand dredging.”

Sarasota was a remarkable place in those days—a small but surprisingly sophisticated town, where a close-knit social group pretty much ran everything. Well-off, mostly older and public-spirited, they energetically supported the arts and social causes. Everyone knew everyone, and their parties, triumphs and milestones were reverently reported by the newspaper’s social columnists.

We had a social column of our own, equally reverent, but our writer had just retired, and Dan, who had been reading the New York publication Details, which was pioneering a new kind of social coverage—fresh, fearless and entertaining—suggested Bob should do something like that for us.

The idea clicked with Bob, and thus was born Mr. Chatterbox. It was the perfect marriage of writer and subject.

Bob was still new to town, curious about how things worked and attracted by the entrée the column would give him. And Sarasota society offered everything that a satiric novelist could want: memorable, often eccentric characters, from stern dowagers to shady social climbers; conflict, including the clash between old and new money; and an endless stream of schemes, dreams and plot twists playing out in a small and self-contained arena.

“Sarasota was its own little world, isolated from other places, and I was given this little world to write about,” Bob recalls. “Those people were not used to being written about except in the most flattering way, and I think—I know—that they were afraid of me at first. They thought I might say something snarky. But then they realized it was fun. It was like a big game, and they could play the game.”

Bob’s monthly Mr. Chatterbox columns—gossipy, funny and mischievous—became the first things many readers turned to when an issue arrived, as well as the talk of the town. Bob intuited—correctly—that Sarasota’s constant stream of wealthy newcomers would appreciate confirmation they’d moved to a fantastic, fashionable place, so we needed to make the magazine glamorous. A terrific photo editor, he worked with our talented party photographers—first Robert Castro and then Rebecca Baxter—to elevate the “Limelight” pages from straight grip-and-grin photos into lively, stylish storytelling. (“Shoot the entire gown, and please, more cleavage!” he urged Rebecca.) “Limelight” became a hugely popular part of the magazine, with some partygoers chasing after Rebecca and imploring her to get their picture in the section.

Not content with chronicling parties and the latest gossip, Bob—as he so often does—found a way to transfigure his subject into fresh art forms. He turned some columns into picture stories—like “How to Behave at a Cocktail Party,” in which local celebrities posed for comic vignettes at a swanky St. Armands residence. Even more ambitiously, he began writing comic works of fiction set in Sarasota and featuring local characters. There was “The Rich Face West,” in which a drug-addled Mr. Chatterbox gets hilarious revenge for being excluded from an A-list party on Longboat Key; it includes scenes at Michael’s on East and real-life characters like attorney David Band, “who had just been appointed to the board of ‘One Last Perk,’ the charity organization that grants dying wishes to terminally ill executives.”

Even more ambitious was “Decorating Can Be Murder,” a nine-part serial in which a closeted elderly decorator—with the pitch-perfect name of Timothy Spryke—teams with Sarasota photographer Cliff Roles to solve a string of murders. Reading it again, I still find myself laughing out loud on every page.

“Bob wrote stories you would never see in other city magazines,” Dan says. “He helped us create the magazine we only imagined—entertaining as well as artistic. And he managed to get people to play along—everybody wanted to be part of the joke.”

He even wrote and starred in a cabaret show, “An Evening With Mr. Chatterbox,” at Florida Studio Theatre. Every night featured a special guest star—including soon-to-be Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who performed the chicken dance.

Bob doesn’t cover the social scene anymore. “Today everything is too poisonous and people are too mean for us to do what we did then,” he says. “Back then, Sarasota had a reputation for being progressive on social issues. Everybody supported Planned Parenthood and got behind the big benefit for AIDS. It was a wonderful place to live and had the right spirit.”

Editing a magazine for a city like Sarasota is a great gig by any measure, but collaborating with Bob turned it into joy. He was a creative catalyst for all of us, from the editors to the art director and illustrators, and we pushed one another to make every issue outdo the previous one. Eccentric and disarming, Bob was hopeless with technology or paperwork, and we editors—at the time, a group of frantically multitasking working mothers—were often amused and annoyed by how incapable he was of dealing with even the slightest household upset. But we adored him, babied him and came alive when he wandered into the office. He was tremendous fun. After spending a sick day in my office watching us plan an issue, my 8-year-old daughter said, “You call that going to work?  All you do is talk to your friends and laugh!”

Bob’s second novel, Love Junkie, was published in 1992 and it, too, will soon be reissued. He is currently working on a third book and contributes to the magazine I now edit, Forum, in addition to continuing to tell the stories of our city in Sarasota Magazine, from a famous art heist in the ’60s to the ballet Balanchine choreographed for Ringling circus elephants. Most go viral as soon as they hit the website.

I recently asked him if he knew why people love his work.

He thought about it for a minute and said, “If I have any kind of talent, it’s that my only agenda is to see and make clear how human nature works. Human nature is so misunderstood. It’s good and it’s bad and it’s endlessly fascinating. It’s what life is all about.”

Photo of Bob Plunket by Tim Robison