"Excellent. This is a fine, and unusual, collection of literary
Americana."--"Atlantic"
"Fine comic moments of truth."--"New York Times Book Review"
"An invaluable source of literary history."--"Publishers
Weekly"
This is the story of one of the most famous literary "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, Phillip Barry, and many
others. They personified the jazz age and the lost generation. The
Murphys have been viewed primarily as cult/pop figures. In this
book Miller shows, through a sequential interweaving of letters
from several correspondents, that they 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 this era.
It is the best sort of eavesdropping.
Gerald and Sara Murphy married on December 30, 1915. Both
families were moneyed and cosmopolitan. Their attraction to each
other was in part based on their desire to escape the routine and
predictable social rounds in which their families were immersed.
Against their families' wishes, they and their three children left
for Europe in 1921. They remained in France for over a decade, and
quite naturally socialized with the expatriate set. They were, in
part, models for Dick and Nicole Diver in "Tender Is the Night."
MacLeish wrote poems about them, their friends paid tribute to them
and relied on them day to day and in correspondence, and their own
letters are worth reading for their liveliness and because they so
well preserve a record of the twenties and thirties.
Miller provides nearly every extant letter between the Murphys
and their friends during those decades. Most of them have not been
published previously, and of course, they have never been presented
collectively. Together, they constitute an epistolary "novel" of
peculiar power and authenticity about a remarkable era.
Linda Patterson Miller is associate professor of English at
Pennsylvania State University at Ogontz.
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