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Aug 11, 2009 | ISBN 9780385533010
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Praise
“If Dorothy Parker had written an episode of Sex and the City, the result would be Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin. Marion Meade knows as much about the 1920’s literary scene as anyone alive, and in this book she has interwoven the adventures of her four heroines into a narrative that reads like fiction – except that, to invert Mary McCarthy’s famous observation, every word she writes is the truth, including and and the. I inhaled it.”
—Amanda Vaill, author of Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy: A Lost Generation Love Story
“Shows why so many young Americans after the ’20s wanted to grow up to be writers. Free love! Staying up late! Dancing and drinking! Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Edna Ferber and Zelda Fitzgerald are visited once again, with wonderful results.”
—The Washington Post Book World (a Best Book of 2004)
“Marion Meade’s narrative device in Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin is matter-of-fact and clear: Take the lives of four prominent female writers and walk them through the ’20s, year by year. Since these ladies got around-in every sense-the larger, American, international literary scene comes into view through their eyes.”
—The Miami Herald
"Reading Meade’s book is like looking at a photo album while listening to a witty insider reminisce about the images. Her writing is bright, her language charged with gritty details . . . gossipy tidbits . . . and accomplished one-liners."
—San Francisco Chronicle (Best Books of 2004)
“As Marion Meade’s new book shows, the legend of the 1920s has not lost its power even today. In its effervescent vulgarity, Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin-a group biography of the four women named above, along with dozens of their friends and hangers-on-finds just the right tone for its subjects.”
—The New York Sun
“The emphasis is on the personalities and personal lives of the women, but Meade… seamlessly weaves professional ambitions, successes and frustrations into their stories… an enjoyable and informative read.”
—Publishers Weekly
“These four inspired and intrepid women were free-spirited ‘celebrities’ before the term was coined, in an era whose legend and tumult became legendary historically and literarily. Their unusual and indelible lives, and scintillating milieu, are vividly captured by Meade in this fast-paced and informative group biography.”
—Booklist
"Marion Meade has done something dazzling. In a kaleidoscopic narrative, she has resurrected the literary heroines of the l920s so that they’re with us still, kicking and screaming and occasionally even writing. Fast living never felt like this on the page before."
—Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)
21 Books You’ve Been Meaning to Read
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