num_pages: 192
description: 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 inTender 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 reproductionsof several of Gerald Murphy's remarkable paintings--canvases that predate Pop Art by forty years.        "Living Well Is the Best Revenge isa 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.
language: English
title: Living Well Is the Best Revenge
titlecomplete: Living Well Is the Best Revenge
characters: Gerald Murphy, Sara Murphy
genres: 20th Century, American, History, Memoir, Nonfiction, France, Biography Memoir, Biography, Art
ratings_count: 628
publisher: Modern Library