LIVING WELL IS THE BEST REVENGE [SIGNED]

Tomkins, Calvin

ISBN 10: 0679603085 / ISBN 13: 9780679603085

Published by The Modern Library, New York, 1998

About this Item

Small Octavo; xiv, 172 pages; Very Good/Very Good; spine silver with black lettering; dust jacket protected in mylar covering, price uncut '$16.95'; minor shelfwear; textblock clean; signed flat by Tomkins on half-title page; shelved in Case 12. First Modern Library Edition. 1367604. Shelved Dupont Bookstore.

Seller Inventory # 1367604

Bibliographic Details

• Title: LIVING WELL IS THE BEST REVENGE [SIGNED]
• Publisher: The Modern Library, New York
• Publication Date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679603085
• ISBN 13: 9780679603085
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition Thus, First Printing.
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)
• Seller catalogs:
  • Biography & Autobiography
  • Dupont Circle
  • Politics, Government, and Law

About this title

Synopsis

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.

From the Back Cover

"        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