Letters from the Lost Generation: Gerald and Sara Murphy and Friends

by Miller, Linda Patterson

• ISBN13: 9780813025360
• ISBN10: 0813025362
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-06-01
• Publisher: Univ Pr of Florida

Summary

This is the story of one of the most famous literary and artistic "sets" of the twentieth century. Gerald and Sara Murphy were at the center of a group including Ernest Hemingway and his wives, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeish, Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley, Philip Barry, and many others. They personified the jazz age and the lost generation. The Murphys have been viewed primarily as cult/pop figures, particularly as they were depicted in Calvin Tomkins's Living Well Is the Best Revenge. This book contains nearly every extant letter between the Murphys and their friends during those decades and shows, through a sequential interweaving of letters from several correspondents, that the Murphys actually were the nucleus without which the group as we know it would not have stayed together. Miller allows the individual correspondents to tell their own stories, providing new insights into their lives and into the spirit of this remarkable era. Book jacket.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	xi
Acknowledgments	xiii
Preface to the Expanded Edition	xvii
Introduction	xxv
Part One: 1925-1932
The Riviera in the Summer	1	(66)
Part Two: 1933-1940
The Sunlight of the Winter Streets	67	(196)
Part Three: 1941-1964
Back There Where We Were	263	(80)
Addendum to the Expanded Edition	343	(16)
Notes	359	(6)
Index	365