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

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Warner Books, 1999 - 470 pages
In Paris in the 1920s, Gerald and Sara Murphy were the emotional nexus of a charmed circle. Their friends and acquaintances included many of the major artistic figures of the 20th century, from Fitzgerald and Hemingway to Dorothy Parker and Picasso. Their Villa America on the Riviera was an enchanted Never-Neverland for their creative coterie and beloved children. However, the idyll they spun was not to last as they would lose both of their sons in the 1930s, and in the coming decades see most of their dear friends self-destruct. However, throughout their lives they provided all with a lesson of courage disguised as taste. In this biography, the author, who had access to private family papers, explores how the talented members of their generation triumphed, suffered and manifested their gifts.

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About the author (1999)

Amanda Vaill is a writer and critic whose articles have appeared in the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and magazines such as Esquire and GQ. Vaill's first book, published in 1998, was a biography of an American couple who were part of the Paris "Lost Generation" in the 1920s. In Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy, A Lost Generation Love Story, Vaill focuses mainly on those years in France, when the Murphys were at the center of a artistic circle that included Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. (Fitzgerald used the Murphys as models for the characters Nicole and Dick Driver in Tender is the Night.) Amanda Vaill lives in New York. Before becoming a full-time writer, she was an executive editor at the Viking Penguin publishing house.

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