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Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy: A Lost Generation Love Story [Paperback]

Amanda Vaill
4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (47 customer reviews)

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Book Description

April 20, 1999
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).

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Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy: A Lost Generation Love Story + Paris Without End: The True Story of Hemingway's First Wife (P.S.) + A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

  • Paperback: 470 pages
  • Publisher: Broadway; 1st Broadway Books trade pbk. ed edition (April 20, 1999)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0767903706
  • ISBN-13: 978-0767903707
  • Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 1.1 x 8 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (47 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #18,987 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

AMANDA VAILL is the author of the bestselling EVERYBODY WAS SO YOUNG: GERALD AND SARA MURPHY - A LOST GENERATION LOVE STORY, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award in biography, and SOMEWHERE: THE LIFE OF JEROME ROBBINS, for which she received a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is also co-author of SEAMAN SCHEPPS: A CENTURY OF NEW YORK JEWELRY DESIGN, an illustrated study of the work of her designer grandfather; and she has edited or contributed to a number of other books in the field of arts and culture. Her screenplay for the feature-length PBS documentary JEROME ROBBINS: SOMETHING TO DANCE ABOUT received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Writing for Nonfiction Programming, and the film won an Emmy, a CINE Golden Eagle, and the George Foster Peabody Award.

Before becoming a full-time writer in 1992, Ms. Vaill was Executive Editor of Viking Penguin, where her authors included Ingmar Bergman, T.C. Boyle, Blanche Wiesen Cook, Iris Murdoch, and William T. Vollman. Her journalism and criticism have appeared in such publications as Architectural Digest, ArtNews, Ballet Review, Esquire, New York Magazine, Town & Country, and The Washington Post. She lives in New York City, and has just finished her next book, a narrative history entitled HOTEL FLORIDA: LOVE AND DEATH IN THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR, whose protagonists include the writers Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn and the photographers Robert Capa and Gerda Taro.

Customer Reviews

This book lets you know them for all they were. S. A Troutt  |  4 reviewers made a similar statement
Amanda Vaill is an excellent storyteller and writer. Dee  |  3 reviewers made a similar statement
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
62 of 63 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating account of Lost Generation love story September 3, 2000
Format:Paperback
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.

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31 of 32 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars An American Literary Classic March 13, 2001
Format:Paperback
What a beautiful, bittersweet work! It will leave you informed, inspired, exalted -- and annoyed that it doesn't go on for another 400 pp. Gerald and Sara Murphy knew and supported and inspired Hemingway, Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeish, Dorothy Parker, Edmund Wilson, Benchley, Fitzgerald, Philip Barry, the glitterati of five decades -- and yet, in many ways, the Murphys outglittered them all, at least if success as human beings can be measured in terms of fundamental decency and intelligence and kindness combined with impeccable grace and taste. The Murphys had everything, gave most of it away, their treasure and their souls, and enriched the literature of an era. "Everybody Was So Young" will wring you out and leave you in grateful tears.
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21 of 21 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Making social history breathe April 29, 2004
Format:Paperback
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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Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars I enjoy the 1920's
I knew I would enjoy the book about the Murphys because I enjoyed their enormous art collection, their children's art, and their letters on exhibit at the Dallas Museum of Art a... Read more
Published 1 month ago by voracious reader
2.0 out of 5 stars Scott & Zelda's friends
You have to have read everything there is to read about the Fitzgeralds to want this book on Gerald and Sara Murphy. Gerald spent most of his time raking the beach. Read more
Published 2 months ago by Paul V. Froiland
5.0 out of 5 stars The patrons of the Lost Generation
This biography, about the unofficial patrons of the post-war expatriate-in-Europe "Lost Generation" (Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Picaso, Parker, the list is endless) was... Read more
Published 3 months ago by Martin Turnbull
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent service
Excellent service. What do you mean that I need 18 more words to complete this review? Do you want me to give the book's dimensions or tell you about the weather? Read more
Published 4 months ago by john forsythe
4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting
not enlightening, but interesting. The Murphy's tried to re-invent themselves and had an interesting life. Read more
Published 4 months ago by D. Stichick
5.0 out of 5 stars Okay, I'm a sucker for Americans in Paris in the 1920's . . .
I knew a little about the Murphys (their wealth, their friends, their support of writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald and the tragic deaths of two of their three children), but I... Read more
Published 5 months ago by Adele E. Prass
5.0 out of 5 stars Pleasurable read, well-written book-highly recommended
Amanda Vaill is an excellent storyteller and writer. It's a very well written book that tells the Murphy's story so well. Read more
Published 6 months ago by Dee
5.0 out of 5 stars Everybody was so Young
This is an interesting book. The author had access to all of the papers, paintings, and family members of the topic couple. Well written and easy to follow.
Published 6 months ago by B. Fleming
5.0 out of 5 stars Mama G
My daughters always send me a list of things they would like to receive for Christmas and this was one of those things!
Published 7 months ago by Mama G
5.0 out of 5 stars A Beautiful Story
Beautifully written and well researched, this is one of the most enjoyable books it's been my pleasure to read. Read more
Published on May 10, 2011 by Gilly Lloyd
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