Living Well is the Best Revenge

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 Lger 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 Murphys 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 Tomkinss new Introduction and a rewritten last chapter.