Everybody Was So Young; Gerald and Sara Murphy: A Lost Generation Love Story

New York: Broadway Books, 1999. First Broadway Books trade paperback edition [stated]. First printing [stated]. Trade paperback. Good. ciii, [4], 470, [4] pages. Illustrations. Author's Note. Notes. Selected Bibliography. Index Autographed sticker on front cover. Signed by the author on the title page. Cover has minor wear and soiling, including sticker residue at the back cover. Amanda Vaill is an American writer and editor. A graduate of Harvard University, she worked in publishing before becoming a writer full-time in 1992. In the 1970s Vaill was an editor at Viking Press alongside Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. In 1995 Vaill published Everybody Was So Young, a biography of Gerald and Sara Murphy, prominent 1920s socialites of the French Riviera. It was nominated for the 1995 National Book Critics Circle Award in biography. She also contributed to the catalogue for Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy, an exhibition mounted by the Williams College Museum of Art, and also shown at the Yale Art Gallery and the Dallas Museum of Art. Her next book was Somewhere, a biography of choreographer Jerome Robbins. Vaill was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000 for her work on Robbins. Vaill wrote Something to Dance About a 2009 PBS documentary about Robbins life and work. Vaill was nominated for the 2009 Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for Nonfiction Programming for Something to Dance About, and the film won both an Emmy and a George Foster Peabody Award. The 2000 television film Sex & Mrs. X, starring Linda Hamilton, was based on a 1999 article Vaill wrote. Vaill has also written for Esquire, The New York Observer, Talk, Harper's Bazaar, Architectural Digest among others. 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). Derived from a Kirkus review: For connoisseurs of the Lost Generation—a well-tempered biography of the wealthy American couple who knew absolutely everybody, from Hemingway to Fitzgerald to Dos Passos to Picasso, and so on and on. Though Sara and Gerald Murphy both dabbled in the arts, their true genius was for friendship. Inherited wealth on both sides gave the Murphys the means and leisure to [live] in style across two continents. They were always willing to help artists on the down and out with quiet gifts of money, but it was their ebullient parties that really cemented their reputation. Archibald MacLeish once wrote, "There was a shrine to life wherever they were . . . a kind of revelation of inherent loveliness." Others were less kind: Hemingway repaid their friendship with slander in A Movable Feast, and they were the model for the Divers in Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night. The marriage had its strains, including possible affairs, and Gerald's probable homosexuality, but it was strong enough to survive any number of blows, including the death of two Murphy children. Vaill's tale is told so well and is crammed with incident and revealing thumbnail sketches of the Lost Generation.