Bobbed hair and bathtub gin : writers running wild in the Twenties
/ Marion Meade
- 1st ed.
- New York : Nan A. Talese/Doubleday , c2004.
- 340 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. [297]-340).
Marion Meade presents a portrait of four extraordinary writers--Dorothy Parker, Zelda Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Edna Ferber--whose loves, lives, and literary endeavors embodied the spirit of the 1920s. Capturing the jazz rhythms and desperate gaiety that defined the era, Meade gives us Parker, Fitzgerald, Millay, and Ferber, traces the intersections of their lives, and describes the men (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson, Harold Ross, and Robert Benchley) who influenced them, loved them, and sometimes betrayed them. Here are the social and literary triumphs (Parker's Round Table witticisms appeared almost daily in the newspapers and Ferber and Millay won Pulitzer Prizes) and inevitably the penances each paid: crumbled love affairs, abortions, depression, lost beauty, nervous breakdowns, and finally, overdoses and even madness. These literary heroines did what they wanted, said what they thought, living wholly in the moment. They kicked open the door for twentieth-century women writers and set a new model for every woman trying to juggle the serious issues of economic independence, political power, and sexual freedom. Meade recreates the excitement, romance, and promise of the 1920s, a decade celebrated for cultural innovation--the birth of jazz, the beginning of modernism--and social and sexual liberation, bringing to light, as well, the anxiety and despair that lurked beneath the nonstop partying and outrageous behavior.
9780385502429
2003064585
Millay, Edna St. Vincent , 1892-1950 Fitzgerald, Zelda , 1900-1948 Parker, Dorothy , 1893-1967 Ferber, Edna , 1887-1968
Authors, American---20th century----Biography Women in literature----History----United States----20th century Women authors, American---20th century----Biography
United States---Social life and customs---20th century