Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: WritersRunning Wild in the Twenties, MarionMeade (Nan A. Talese, 2004)***

If you’ve read and liked the writers of the Twenties, you’ll enjoy this little book bout

four of its best known women writers, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, Edna Ferber, and Zelda Fitzgerald. The book covers their lives from 1920 to 1930, moving back and forth from one to the other in consecutive chapters. You will also enjoy this book if you have lived in the Big Apple, because there’s some fascinating history of the city during that time.

 

Edna Millay was best known for her poetry, of course; Dorothy Parker for her column in The New Yorker, Edna Ferber for her novels and Zelda for her more famous husband, novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. However, each of these women were talented, had a marvelous sense of humor, and lived extraordinary lives. The emphasis is on the personal lives and personalities of these women and reads at times like a gossip column, but that’s part of the fun. They were characters. They were, in fact, legendary.

Edna Millay flouted many conventions of her time, sometimes bordering on the scandalous with her bisexual behavior. Dorothy Parker, who helped found The New Yorker, was best known for her wit and sarcasm. Zelda, who drank too much and behaved outrageously, epitomized the flapper generation and set many of their trends.  Edna Ferber, the most staid of the four, wrote novels that are still quite popular today, several of which were made into movies (e.g, Giant).

All four of these women seem to define the term ‘free-spirited’, and that is what makes this book such fun to read. It makes one yearn for such a carefree, adventurous, joyous era. I think I would have liked living in such a time and place as Twenties New York.