Product Description

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--one of the best reviewed books of 1995--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 (Nicole and Dick Diver in Tender is the Night were modeled after the Murphys). 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).

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #46360 in Books
• Published on: 1999-04-20
• Released on: 1999-04-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 pages

Amazon.com
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

From Library Journal
Often considered minor Lost Generation celebrities, the Murphys were in fact much more than legendary party givers. Vaill's compelling biography unveils their role in the European avant-garde movement of the 1920s; Gerald was a serious modernist painter. But Vaill also shows how their genius for friendship and for transforming daily life into art attracted the most creative minds of the time: Picasso, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The New York Times Book Review, Brooke Allen
Too much, perhaps, has been written about Paris in the '20s...nevertheless, Vaill's version is elegantly written and well worth perusing.

Customer Reviews

A wonderful biography of two people
I recently discovered this book so will try not to repeat the favorable reviews of others. I have visited most of the locations in this book and will try to search out the Murphy's history the next time I go. They lived magical lives in a period of tremendous artistic creativity. The 1920s in Paris were a unique period for American literature. That the Murphys were at the center of it makes this book required reading for anyone who wants to study the period. I have been in Sylvia's Beach's Shakespeare and Company, still there on the left bank, but the magic is gone. What must it have been like to be part of this generation of expatriates ? Read the book and find out. It is terrific.

Too much
The world of the rich-and-famous is ever fascinating. Here we're given entree into the Murphy world. If this is your favorite genre, you'll like this. However, I became satiated very early on too much richness, too many names, too many details. I found it over written, over talky. Everyone is charming (one way or another) and I can see why celeb advocates would adore this. Not I.

"Making It New"
I had to go out and buy this book after seeing "Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy" at the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, MA. The book is terrific, but if you're interested in this period, its writers and artists than track down this exhibit. It's a wonderful and extraordinary show about the Murphys and those they were friends with. Paintings, theater pieces, diary entries, letters, amazing photographs, home movies and more illustrate that the Murphys were really an essential part of the 1920s and 1930s. An argument can be made that they were the center that everything spun out from. It is absolutely sensational.