Customer Reviews

Vanity fair, selections from America's most memorable magazine: a cavalcade of the 1920s and 1930s

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An awful lot of what went on during those two decades had significant influence on the world in which we live today. "Vanity Fair," one of the leading magazines of the era, covered, among other things, personalities, taste, art and trends of the period spanning the years from 1919 to 1935.

Early in the era we're treated to fiction and/or poetry by such luminaries as Anita Loos, Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Parker, and a myriad of others.

There are photos of Nijinsky, a very young Douglas Fairbanks, Caruso, young Helen Hayes, Lionel Barrymore, and more prominent personalities than I can list.

Each year, a half dozen or so personalities were nominated to the "Vanity Fair" Hall of Fame.

A few of the many nominations:

1919: Tyrus (Ty) Cob and George M. Cohan

1924: Edna Ferber, Rebecca West, and Will Rogers

1929: Robinson Jeffers

1931: Walter Disney (He hadn't become Walt yet)

1935: Thomas Wolfe, Clifford Odets and Igor Stravinsky

There were lists for every year from 1919 to 1935.

One of my favorite articles from 1931 was titled "Impossible Interviews." It included dialog from these pseudo interviews along with hand drawn colored caricatures of the participants. The two interviews included here were "John D. Rockefeller, senior (sic) versus Joe Stalin" and "Greta Garbo versus Calvin Coolidge."

A 1930 article, "The Art of Dying," which discusses how people die, their last words, and their attitudes towards death, is as pertinent today as it was over 70 years ago.

Another article, this by Aldous Huxley, titled "The importance of the Comic Genious," talks about how few are the examples of comic genius in the arts, when compared to the many examples of genius of more serious type. Huxley mentions especially, Chaucer, Rabelais, Shakespeare's 'Falstaff,' and several others including some Dickens characters, in addition to the pictorial works of Daumier and Goya. He then goes on to discuss why these are works of genius, and how difficult it is to portray this sort of serio-comedy.

Article after article, work of fiction upon work of fiction, poems, photographs. illustrations, and biographical cameos fill this coffee table sized book of over 3oo pages with articles of nostalgia that make me wish that I could have been around then.