Marion Meade re-creates the aura of excitement, romance, and promise of the 1920s, a decade celebrated for cultural innovation—the birth of jazz, the beginning of modernism—and social and sexual liberation, bringing to light, as well, the anxiety and despair that lurked beneath the nonstop partying and outrageous, unconventional behavior. The literary heroines in Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin did what they wanted, said what they thought. They drank gallons of cocktails and knew how to have fun in New York, the Riviera, and Hollywood, where they met and played with all the people worth knowing. They kicked open the door for twentieth-century female writers and set a new model for every woman trying to juggle the serious issues of economic independence, political power, and sexual freedom.
In a style and tone that perfectly captures the jazzy rhythms and desperate gaiety that defined the era, Meade tells the individual stories of Parker, Fitzgerald, Millay, and Ferber, traces the intersections of their lives, and describes the men—including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson, Harold Ross, and Robert Benchley—who influenced them, loved them, and sometimes betrayed them. She describes their social and literary triumphs (Parker’s Round Table witticisms appeared almost daily in the newspapers and Ferber and Millay won Pulitzer Prizes) and writes movingly of the penances they paid: the crumbled love affairs, abortions, depression, lost beauty, nervous breakdowns, and, finally, overdoses and even madness.
A vibrant mixture of literary scholarship, social history, and gossip, Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin is rich evocation of a period that continues to intrigue and captivate listeners.
“This book is gossip, taken to the highest, cosmic level, a social movement explained in terms of trivial detail that makes everything ‘real.’”—Washington Post
