This is the story of one of the most famous literary
sets
of the 20th century. Gerald and Sara Murphy were at the centre of a group that included Ernest Hemingway and his wives, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeish, Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley, Phillip Barry and many others. They personified the jazz age and the lost generation. The Murphys have been viewed primarily as cult-pop figures, particularly as they were depicted in Calvin Tomkin’s
Living Well is the Best Revenge . In this book, Miller shows, through a sequential interweaving of letters from several correspondents, that they were actually the nucleus without which the group as we know it would not have stayed together. Miller allows the individual correspondents to tell their own stories, providing new insights into their lives and this era. Miller provides nearly every extant letter between the Murphys and their friends during the 20s and 30s, when they were living in France. Most of these letters have not been published previously and have never been presented collectively.