FICTION: ANNA CAREYreviews Auntie Mame: An Irreverent EscapadeBy Patrick Dennis, Penguin Modern Classics, 316pp, £9.99

IT HAS BEEN described by Camille Paglia as "the American Alice in Wonderland" and "one of the most important books in my life", by the screenwriter Paul Rudnick as "a drunken fairytale" and by the playwright Charles Busch as "a hilarious, glamorous bible". And now Patrick Dennis's dazzling novel Auntie Mameis back in print on this side of the Atlantic for the first time in 50 years.

Originally published in 1955, it’s the story of an orphan named, coincidentally, Patrick Dennis, who goes to live with his impossibly glamorous Auntie Mame in 1920s New York. He arrives when Mame is hosting a party at her Japanese-style apartment, and at first he’s terrified of this beautiful kimono-clad woman and her extraordinary friends. But then “she put her arms around me and kissed me, and I knew I was safe”. The novel follows Mame’s and Patrick’s adventures over the following 20 years.

Funny and fabulous, Mame is both mocked and celebrated by her creator. She may be outrageous and sometimes silly, but she’s witty, smart and shrewd, and whenever she makes a fool of herself for love or politics she sees the error of her ways and keeps going, undaunted.

Over the course of the novel and its equally entertaining sequel, Around the World with Auntie Mame, she reinvents herself as, among other things, a southern belle, an English aristocrat, a communist and an Anglo-Irish writer, adopting and discarding personae according to her mood.

Arch but not hollow, Auntie Mame is wicked but also good-natured and optimistic. And there are genuine feelings beneath all the flair. Mame may drive Patrick mad (and vice versa), but at heart their relationship is a positive one, with Mame providing just the right amount of freedom, love and wild adventure. As Dennis writes of their first meeting: “For both of us it was love, and the experience was unique.”

Mame also has a social conscience – Rudnick described her as "a classic leftie activist in emeralds and Dior" – and reserves most of her rage (and some of her best lines) for bigots and snobs. But Dennis couldn't resist poking fun at her political beliefs. In Around the World with Auntie Mameshe drags Patrick to a communal farm in the USSR, where she hopes to live in egalitarian bliss with other English-speaking comrades. It becomes clear that most of the supposed class warriors are happy to let the black and Asian comrades do all the housework. This chapter was left out when the book first appeared, in the McCarthyite 1950s.

Despite being rejected by 19 publishers before it was accepted, in 1955, the book was a huge success, selling more than two million copies. The 1958 film adaptation added to the sales, and while Auntie Mame didn’t stay in print for long on this side of the Atlantic, copies of the film-tie-in Pan paperback were still easy to find in second-hand shops in the 1990s, which is how I discovered and fell in love with the book as a teenager.

In all, Dennis wrote 16 bestselling books, including the amazing Little Me, a lavishly illustrated (and deliriously camp) parody of celebrity memoirs. But in 1974, having lost most of his fortune in misjudged investments, he turned his back on writing, saying: "I'm out of fashion and I've said everything that I had to say. Twice." In an act of reinvention that would have amazed even Mame, he became a butler for the ultrarich of Palm Beach, joking that he "would rather serve these people than have to talk to them". He worked under his real name, Edward Tanner, so none of his employers knew he was a famous author. His final employer was Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald's.

Dennis was married with two children. Although he and his wife never divorced, in the early 1960s he left her for a male partner. He remained a loving father, and his son, Michael, now a psychiatrist at New York’s Bellevue Hospital, has written about his father with sympathy and great affection. Dennis died of cancer in 1976, aged 55.

When facing a difficult decision, there are some who ask: “What would Jesus do?” As a student, the fictional Patrick Dennis and his friends “would ask ourselves what Fred Astaire would do, and we did likewise”. And there are some of us who when faced with a pressing problem ask ourselves: “What would Auntie Mame do?” The answer may not always be practical, but it usually cheers us up.

Anna Carey is a freelance journalist