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Title: Everybody Was So Young : Gerald and Sara Murphy: A Lost Generation Love Story by Amanda Vaill ISBN: 0-7679-0370-6 Publisher: Broadway Pub. Date: 20 April, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.32 (25 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Fascinating account of Lost Generation love story
Comment: If anyone could be said to have lived a charmed life, it would be Gerald and Sara Murphy. They were wealthy, artistic and talented, with three beautiful, loving children and a circle of friends who became famous and accomplished in their own right. They gave wonderful parties that are still remembered a half-century later, were generous to those in need, and best of all, Gerald and Sara loved each other deeply, with an affection that grew as they lived their lives to the inevitable, bitter end.
Anyone who has read into the lives of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Picasso and the other expatirot residents of Paris in the 1920s will recognize Gerald and Sara, perhaps unfavorably as hanger-ons who supplied the money the others lived on. That unfair assessment is turned on its head in Amanda Vaill's dual biography of the couple.
The Murphys were more than a bank account who gave parties; celebrity bottom feeders more interested in status than in accomplishments. They were something of an oddity. Both were from wealthy families, yet both wanted more than the family life they craved. Gerald had an eye for art, music and decorating; it was amazing to learn he was first to boost many artists who later became famous; "Grandchildren," he said as he showed them a copy of "Meet the Beatles." "Pay attention. These young men are going to be very, very important."
From their village in the Antibes, which was a backwater when they discovered it, they befriended people like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Archibald Macleish, Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett as well, while Gerald became famous in his own right for his finely detailed studies of mechanical devices: a watch, a machine, of a boat deck and smokestacks.
But if there's anything experience teaches us, it's that no one really leads a charmed life. It's all filled with day-to-day worries, irritations, tragedies and, with luck, some glory. But Gerald and Sara came close -- the 20s were their time -- and it's a fine thing to finish a biography of someone and find that you like them even more than before.
Rating: 5
Summary: Eye- and mind-opening, and very moving
Comment: If you thought you knew about the Murphys, thought you knew about American ex pats in the 20s ... think again. The amount of new material here is remarkable, and for the first time one gets the sense that the Murphys' role in cultural history was far more than that of passing hors d'oeuvres and mixing drinks. Gerald and Sara were major figures in the European avant garde--contributors in their own right--before Fitzgerald, Hemingway, etc, got there, for example. This is the also first time Gerald's painting has been given its due. Above all, though, this book reveals two people with an astonishing gift for friendship--far from self-absorbed, a term better applied to the American writers who used them, they were instead open, generous--whose lives turned from surface glamor to intense, and deeply moving, private agony, as tragedy befell their children. The glamorous surface we knew about: the far more beautiful full story is here.
Rating: 5
Summary: Making social history breathe
Comment: Few books deserve to be 'raved' about but mark this one as a definite 5 stars. Brilliantly researched and detailed, the author made these people 'real' to me, I felt I knew them. The Murphys, so very different yet so very much alike were 'The hostesses with the mostest' to all the upcoming glitterati of the 20's furnishing both emotional and monetary support at crucial times to Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Cole Porter (and others) with a grace and charm that is as impressive now as it was then. It would have been so easy for Vaill just to cover that but she gives the lives behind the facade, the odd and distant relationships with both sets of parents and family, the heartbreak and sorrow of loss of their two sons that seemed to end all the lightness in theie lives. They and the world they had created were never the same after, as both they and their friends even at the time recognized. Its sometimes so easy to forget that the 20's were a brief flickering of a frantic time between a war and a depression. The Murphys lived before and after but somehow they both defined and were defined by that period. This book lets you know them for all they were.
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Title: Living Well Is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins ISBN: 0679603085 Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 17 November, 1998 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Letters from the Lost Generation: Gerald and Sara Murphy and Friends by Gerald Murphy, Linda Patterson Miller, Sara Murphy ISBN: 0813025362 Publisher: University Press of Florida Pub. Date: June, 2002 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Sara and Gerald: Villa America and After by Honoria Murphy Donnelly, Richard N. Billings ISBN: 0812910303 Publisher: Times Books Pub. Date: November, 1982 List Price(USD): $39.50 |
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Title: Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties by Noel Riley Fitch ISBN: 0393302318 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: May, 1985 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Intimate Lies: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sheilah Graham Her Son's Story by Robert Westbrook ISBN: 0060183438 Publisher: HarperCollins Pub. Date: July, 1995 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
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