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

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.