“For anyone who dreams of Paris in the ‘20’s, here is the definitive account of its most poignant romance. Amanda Vaill has brought to life not only Gerald and Sara Murphy, but those with whom they made their absorbing and fascinating lives…seen here when ‘everybody was so young,’ before the century made them giants.” Honor Moore, author of Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury
Everybody Was So Young
Gerald and Sara Murphy: A Lost Generation Love Story
- A New York Times Book Review bestseller
- Finalist, National Book Critics’ Circle Award
A real-life Tender Is the Night: the story of expatriate painter Gerald Murphy and his wife Sara, a gifted, wealthy, and well-connected couple at the center of the literary and artistic scene in Paris and the French Riviera in the 1920’s.
Their glamor and allure captivated friends such as Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Pablo Picasso, who used them in their work; but none of these artists could have envisioned the tenacity with which the Murphys struggled to hold themselves and their charmed circle together through the dark years of the 30’s and 40’s, when death, financial ruin, madness, and war assailed them.
Although Fitzgerald once said that there were no second acts in American lives, the Murphys felt differently: they knew they had to play out their script until the final curtain, and they did so, with the grace that marked everything they undertook, sustaining each other, and those they loved, through loss and war and betrayal until the very end. ▣
Praise for Everybody Was So Young
“A story of legendary dimensions, and Vaill has done it justice.” Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World
“I think her book is superb… generous, acutely sensitive, and deeply moving.” Calvin Tomkins, author of Living Well Is the Best Revenge
“Amanda Vaill has succeeded brilliantly in producing an unusually penetrating portrait of a marriage… perceptive, beautifully written, and exhaustively researched.” Selena Hastings, TLS
“A haunting tribute to courage, devotion, and an irretrievable dream lived to its fullest.” Lainie Goodman, The Times (London)
“A richly-detailed and affecting biography.” Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times
“A marvelously readable biography… elegantly written.” Brooke Allen, New York Times Book Review (front page)
“An exhaustively researched and brilliantly rendered biography.” Los Angeles Times
“Such is Amanda Vaill’s skill — and it is almost incredible that this is her first book — that she makes what might have been a literary footnote into an enthralling and deeply moving narrative.” Lynn Barber, The Observer (London)
“A brilliant and wise account.” San Francisco Chronicle