Living Well Is The Best Revenge

TOMKINS, Calvin

Published by The Modern Library, 1998

About this Item

TOMKINS, Calvin [172] pp. The Modern Library 1998 7 1/2" x 5" Jacket painting: Detail of Cocktail, 1927 by Gerald Murphy 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 Leger 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. Seller Inventory # 34995

Bibliographic Details

Title: Living Well Is The Best Revenge

Publisher: The Modern Library

Publication Date: 1998

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Fine

Dust Jacket Condition: Fine