Everybody Was So Young
Amanda Vaill
Amanda Vaill’s biography of Gerald and Sara Murphy opens the Lost Generation story beyond Hemingway and follows the couple at the center of its friendships.
Biography
Researched accounts of a life, a marriage, or a creative circle, written from evidence rather than personal memory alone.
Biography reconstructs a life from letters, archives, interviews, published work, and the records left by other people. Unlike memoir, it is not limited to what one participant remembers or chooses to disclose.
The form is especially useful for literary Paris because the famous memoirs often disagree. A biography can place those competing versions beside dates, correspondence, and the testimony of the wider circle.
Everybody Was So Young is the clearest example on these shelves. Amanda Vaill follows Gerald and Sara Murphy while also explaining the writers and artists around them, giving the reader a broader history than any one member of the group could provide.
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