Introduction

A dazzling biography for readers of The Great Gatsby and other Lost Generation authors

Gifted artist Gerald Murphy and his elegant wife, Sara, were icons of the most enchanting period of our time; handsome, talented, and wealthy expatriate Americans, they were at the very center of the literary scene in Paris in the 1920s. In Everybody Was So Young Amanda Vaill brilliantly portrays both the times in which the Murphys lived and the fascinating friends who flocked around them. Whether summering with Picasso on the French Riviera or watching bullfights with Hemingway in Pamplona, Gerald and Sara inspired kindred creative spirits like Dorothy Parker, Cole Porter, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Fitzgerald even modeled his main characters in Tender is the Night after the couple. Their story is both glittering and tragic, and in this sweeping and richly anecdotal portrait of a marriage and an era, Amanda Vaill "has brought them to life as never before" (Chicago Tribune).

Editorial Review

Gerald and Sara Murphy were the golden couple of the Lost Generation. Born to wealth and privilege, they fled the stuffy confines of upper-class America to reinvent themselves in France as legendary party givers and enthusiastic participants in the modernist revolution of the 1920s. He became an important painter; she made everyday life a work of art. Their friends F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos all based fictional characters on the Murphys; Picasso painted them; and Calvin Tomkins rekindled their glamour for a younger generation in his affectionate 1971 portrait, Living Well Is the Best Revenge. Amanda Vaill's vivid new biography builds on Tomkins's work to provide a full-length account of the Murphys' remarkable life together.

As well as good times, that life included suffering endured with great courage. The Murphys' teenage sons died within two years of each other in the mid-1930s--one suddenly, one after a long battle with tuberculosis--and the Depression forced Gerald to resume the uncongenial work of managing his family's business. Vaill's sensitive rendering reveals the moral substance that enabled this stylish couple to survive heartbreak. But it's her marvelous evocation of those magical expatriate years that lingers in the memory. The wit and imaginative panache with which the Murphys lived sparkles again, recapturing a splendid historical moment. As Sara later said, "It was like a great fair, and everybody was so young." --Wendy Smith

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