Living Well Is the Best Revenge - Couverture rigide

In this enchanting memoir, New Yorker writer Calvin Tomkins re-creates the privileged world of Gerald and Sara Murphy, two American originals who found themselves at the center of a charmed circle of artists and expatriate writers in France in the 1920s. Their home in Antibes, Villa America, served as a gathering place for Picasso and Léger as well as Hemingway and Fitzgerald, who used the glamorous couple as models for Dick and Nicole Diver in
Tender Is the Night. A bestseller when it first appeared in 1971, Living Well Is the Best Revenge features sixty-nine intimate photographs collected from the Murphys' family album, along with reproductions
of several of Gerald Murphy's remarkable paintings--canvases that predate Pop Art by forty years.
        "Living Well Is the Best Revenge is
a superb little study, alive with an elegance very much the Murphys'," said Nancy Mitford. Critic Russell Lynes found the book to be "at once a sharp and charming evocation of an era and a cast, mostly delightful, surely famous, and usually talented, written with an elegant balance between tongue in cheek and sympathy."
        This Modern Library edition includes Calvin Tomkins's new Introduction and a rewritten last chapter.

"        The dichotomy between art and life
permeates Tomkins's book and makes
up its principal charm. . . . [The Murphys]
drew artists and writers to them
ineluctably. After all, they were works
of art while the others--Stein,Picasso, Hemingway, MacLeish, Fitzgerald--
were only trying to create such
works. . . . [This is a] beautiful and
evocative memoir. . . . The charming
and imperturbable Gerald Murphy
[was] a master of the art of living."
--Louis Auchincloss

"        A marvel of taste and economy, Living
Well Is the Best Revenge manages to
convey the originality and grace of
the Murphys' life."
                                                        --Time