Reviews for Letters from the Lost Generation: Gerald and Sara Murphy and Friends, Expanded Edition

The average rating for Letters from the Lost Generation: Gerald and Sara Murphy and Friends, Expanded Edition based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-05-18 00:00:00 Thomas Boucher I have never read a book quite like this, an epistolary biography chronicling the lives of a group of people, in this case a group of Americans who met as ex-pats living in France connected through an avid interest in art and literature but also in the good life. And life was good on the French Riviera in the 1920s, especially if you were the guest of the charming, cultivated, and wealthy Murphys at their Villa American. Sara and Gerald Murphy are at the center of this book: The letters it contains are to and from them, with the other parties involved such literary luminaries as Ernest Hemingway and his second wife Pauline, F. Scott Fitzgerald and before she became ill and was institutionalized his wife Zelda, Archibald Macleish, Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, and John and Katy Dos Passos, among others. The editor of the book has divided the letters into three sections, forming a chronology, with editor's notes before each section that explain the major events of each time period, events that are sometimes referred to in the letters but often are not. Indeed, the letters are interesting as much for what they reveal as well what they conceal about these people. The book started out slowly for me, but I eventually got quite caught up in the personalities, alliances, misalliances, misunderstandings, love, loyalty, and shared grief over life's inevitable losses, though some of them are truly terrible and tragic. I am always sad after reading a biography. Biographies follow the trajectory of people's lives, and we know where the end lies. But living through these people's lives through their letters had an even greater immediacy and intensity than the usual digested biography. For me, among the letter-writers, the person who sparkled the most was Katy Dos Passos. Her descriptions of domestic life are so colorful, so funny, so alive. I had to put the book down for a while when I had come to her last letter. It was just too sad for a time to go on. It is a moving book.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-04-13 00:00:00 Montez Tate The things that struck me most: Fitzgerald's heartbreaking letters about his struggles in Hollywood, his health, and financial struggles. The Murphys' condescension toward him, as well as their malignant, passive-aggressive hints that Hemingway should dump Hadley for Pauline (without having the guts to come out and say it directly); Hemingway later grew to regard divorcing Hadley as the greatest mistake of his life. Katy Dos Passos' affected attempts to be gay and literary: "Aren't the Greeks a wonderful little people?" All the letters are full of atmosphere and are more evocative of the times than most of the biographies I've read on the Murphys and their circle. The most striking sentence of the entire book was from a letter Zelda wrote to the Murphys from Montgomery, Alabama, right after Scott's death: "Those tragically ecstatic years when the pockets of the world were filled with pleasant surprizes and people still thought of life in terms of their right to a good time are now about to wane." The book is helpfully annotated and augmented with balanced passages that explain the circumstances of the subjects' lives and times. I can't recall if any of the letters that Patrick Murphy (Gerald & Sara's son) wrote in the months before his tragic death are included here, but if not, they can be found in Honoria Murphy Donnelley's memoir "Sara and Gerald: Villa America and After." They are utterly poignant and heartrending.