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.


The New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
As Ms. Vaill implies at the conclusion of her affecting book, the couple would finally achieve the perfection they sought but one that only death could guarantee.


The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Paul Alexander
...[an] exhaustively researched and brilliantly rendered biography...


From Kirkus Reviews
For connoisseurs of the Lost Generationa 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. As Sara once told F. Scott Fitzgerald: ``I dont think the world is a very nice placeAnd all there seems to be left to do is to make the best of it while we are here, & be VERY grateful for ones friendsbecause they are the best there is, & make up for many another thing that is lacking.'' Inherited wealth on both sides gave the Murphys the means and leisure to pursue this credo 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 Fitzgeralds Tender Is the Night. The marriage had its strains, including possible affairs, and Geralds probable homosexuality, but it was strong enough to survive any number of blows, including the death of two Murphy children. A former Viking Penguin executive editor turned writer, Vaill tries to make up for the secondary celebrity status of the Murphys by infusing their lives with a sorrowing Gatsbyesque grandeur. Its an admirable, but not quite convincing, effort. Still her tale is told so well and so crammed with incident and revealing thumbnail sketches of the Lost Generation (often on their worst behavior), one tends to forget the relative unimportance of the Murphys themselves. (24 pages b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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).

FROM THE CRITICS

Entertainment Weekly

Captures the laughter, the wit, the cocktails, and the sheer exuberance of this still-alluring period.

Los Angeles Times

Exhaustively researched and brilliantly rendered.

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt - The New York Times \

A richly detailed and affecting biography.

Brooke Allen - The New York Times Book Review \

Marvelously readable...elegantly written.

Los Angeles Times

Exhaustively researched and brilliantly rendered.Read all 7 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Amanda Vaill