Gentlemen Prefer Blondes - Modernism Lab Essays Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Elyse Graham When James Joyce was nearly blind and working on the first draft of Finnegans Wake , the book he permitted himself during his daily reading window was Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a best-selling satire by Anita Loos . 1 The book has the interest of biographical color rather than any usefulness for explaining the Wake. But Loos uses language in an interesting way; her book is a prime example of modernist techniques seeping into popular use. And the dialect humor is close to what Joyce worked for in certain chapters of his earlier books. (In fact, although Loos works against the background of modernism and name-checks Conrad, there is an important sense in which her book is a reminder of how much high modernism borrowed from popular culture. Emphasis on the material of language had characterized the main stream of American literary humor throughout the nineteenth century.) Loos grew up in California in a small family that ran a nickelodeon. She spent her spare hours at the library poring over magazines that arrived from back East.

For extra income, her father enrolled his children as players in various stock troupes and touring companies, but Loos apparently didn’t care for acting. At six years old, she had won a children’s poetry contest, which left her intent, she later said, to become a famous writer (Carey, 15-20). 2 She struck the right kind of writing for her historical moment in 1916. That year she sketched out a film treatment—it was a short story laid out visually, since she didn’t know scriptwriting technique—and mailed it to Biograph, the production company that made reels for her family’s theater. An envelope returned bearing a check and a release form. She was twenty-three years old. Over the next several years, Loos wrote a number of scripts for Biograph and eventually moved to New York City-- where, she recalled later, she would be "breathing the same air as Henry Mencken" (Carey, 21-28). Loos befriended Mencken, and later claimed to have had a flirtatious relationship with him—not a distinction; he tried to charm most of the women he met.

One day in 1924, while riding a train across the Midwest, Loos noticed that the men in her car ignored her but leaped to hoist luggage for the blonde beside her. She simmered and thought about a blonde who then had Mencken’s arm, undeservedly in Loos’s opinion. "There was some mystifying difference between us,” she later wrote of the train passenger. “Why did she so far outdistance me in feminine allure? Could her power, like that of Samson, have something to do with her hair?" 3 Loos took out a yellow pad and began to write. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes became the American best-seller of 1925 . When it first appeared in serial in the women's magazine "Harper's Bazaar," the story made circulation fly—and so increased male readership that makers of cigars, menswear, and sporting goods started to run ads (Loos, 80).

Edith Wharton, tongue only a little in cheek, hailed it as "the great American novel." "Apparently," wrote a theater critic in 1926, "every present day musical show is compelled by law to include a song called 'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.'" 4 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes masquerades as the diary of one Lorelei Lee, a flapper from Little Rock who lives well on the bounty of older men. With a brunette friend who, in the capacity of chaperone, eggs her on, Lorelei has various adventures in gold-digging and finally marries a Philadelphia millionaire, whom she convinces to move to Hollywood so she can be in pictures. The book had nothing new to say about sexual politics. Even ten years earlier, chorus girls and blondes were worn gags on the magazine circuit. 5 The richness of Blondes lies in its mastery—and it is mastery—of dialect and irony. Loos always said that she finished the manuscript on the train and forgot it in her suitcase for six months, but six months is just enough time to groom prose and leave a cover of indifference. If comedy is a rhetorical device, so is talent.

Lorelei writes not dictates, but her prose follows the mannerisms of colloquial speech, with lots of fragmented sentences, verbal tics ("I was intreeged," "It was devine"), and verbal filler surrounding repeating key phrases. The idea is that not much mental organizing intervenes between brain signal and written word. March 16th: A gentleman friend and I were dining at the Ritz last evening and he said that if I took a pencil and a paper and put down all of my thoughts it would make a book. This almost made me smile as what it would really make would be a whole row of encyclopediacs. I mean I seem to be thinking practically all of the time. I mean it is my favorite recreation and sometimes I sit for hours and do not seem to do anything else but think. So this gentleman said a girl with brains ought to do something else with them besides think. And he said he ought to know brains when he sees them, because he is in the senate and he spends quite a great deal of time in Washington, d. c., and when he comes into contract with brains he always notices it. 6 Free association doesn’t entail candidness.

Lorelei euphemizes as she goes. "So of course if a gentleman is educating a girl," she says, "he likes to stay and talk about topics of the day until quite late, so I am quite fatigued the next day and I do not really get up until it is time to dress for dinner at the Colony" (Blondes, 13). What talk means is anyone's guess. As Susan Hegeman observes, the effect of the novel's doublespeak is to leave open to the imagination any number of possible levels of scandal. On one hand, Lorelei's sexual magnetism is apparent from the way men act around her; but on the other, she comes across as oddly sexless. She even gives men childish nicknames like "Daddy" and "Piggy." She withholds the mention of sex for so long that it becomes a preoccupation for the reader, just as it is for her male followers. 7 The irony of Blondes, in short, refuses to reveal its bottom. At the verbal level, Lorelei’s solecisms undermine her pretensions about herself and the gentlemen who furnish her education. At another level, Lorelei is an ignoramus pretending even greater ignorance.

She perpetually undercuts her scatterbrained prose with shrewd mercenary conduct, which she undercuts again by giving fifty-centime tips in France because the coin is so small. Lorelei's true intelligence and her true actions are questions that never resolve. Nothing puts what the heroine is trading for gifts, but our knowledge of the sexual economy urges us to fill in the gaps (Hegeman, 536). This is the source of the novel's cynicism. Blondes shows its readers to match Lorelei in worldly knowledge, but they likely stop short of her worldly behavior. Because the novel mocks just such bourgeois morality-- Lorelei vouches for her father’s respectability by citing his Elk membership; a censor board excises naughty bits from films, then watches the cuts obsessively-- the reader emerges not as a moral hero but as another fool. Loos’s genius was to recognize this. Lorelei's narration burlesques, in excoriating detail, the vernacular of the American middle class. Lorelei uses "you" as an indefinite pronoun, swallows complicated concepts in vague nouns, and rounds out sentences with mindless verbal filler.

Apparently to sound sophisticated, she upgrades "me" to "I" in such phrases as "a sweet girl like I." Her cramped vocabulary prompts her to recycle adjectives: "quite" and "quite a lot" to mean everything from somewhat to vehemently to often to incessantly, and "nice" for all manner of moral euphemisms ("a nice girl"). (The latter substitution is especially barbed, since it questions the difference between innocence and stupidity.) Compounding this effect is the tendency of her sentences to wander around repeated key words and phrases. The repetitive phrasing, combined with a dearth of punctuation-- she can spell, but she punctuates sloppily-- forces upward interesting structural variations, sometimes creating odd poetry: So Mr. Spoffard spends all of his time looking at things that spoil peoples morals. So Mr. Spoffard really must have very strong morals or else all the things that spoil other peoples morals would spoil his morals. But they do not seem to spoil Mr. Spoffards morals and I really think it is wonderful to have such strong morals.

(Blondes, 138) The patterning forces the reader to look close—to consider anew, as verbal artifacts, familiar items of American slang: "an old fashioned girl," "having a good time." At the same time, the repeating phrases become tonal variations on middle-class banality. Loos probably owes something to Ring Lardner and something to Gertrude Stein. 8 Lorelei’s idiomatic basis in the bourgeoisie raises the novel's satirical stakes. By its lights, Lorelei’s semiliteracy is mass ignorance, her sexual doublespeak is social hypocrisy, and her mercenary instinct is the grubby soul of capitalism. Loos liked to joke that the Russian authorities endorsed her book as a capitalist tragedy-- a reading, as she knew, that is perfectly respectable. In Susan Hegeman's entertaining gloss, Lorelei's diamonds are credible shorthand for the way wealth covers its dubious origins. The gifts of jewelry she receives improve (we may suppose) her looks-- which attracts more gifts-- which make her yet more attractive-- a process that mimics the circulation of capital attracting capital.

As her "capital of attractiveness" builds, the suspect labor behind it slides in importance-- so that by the book's end, Lorelei is so cleansed that she is fit to marry a prominent bluenose (Hegeman, 543). Lorelei rises through conspicuous consumption, and she is herself a display of men's pecuniary strength. She is the endpoint of commodification, the consumer who is also a consumer good. The novel gets its moral center from Lorelei’s brunette friend, Dorothy. Dorothy approves of Lorelei's dealings; what distinguish her are brains and a lack of taste for hypocrisy. (Told that a candidate for district attorney has poured $1,000 of liquor down his sink and is petitioning all to do likewise, Dorothy asks, "If he poured 1,000 dollars worth down his sink to get himself one million dollars worth of publicity and a good job—when we pour it down our sink, what do we get?") (Blondes, 142-43) Dorothy doesn’t draw suitors as Lorelei does, but she seems to interest a few worthy men.

Lorelei moans when Dorothy turns down lunch with a studio magnate in favor of “a gentleman called Mr. Mencken from Baltimore who really only prints a green magazine which has not even got any pictures in it." "But," Lorelei adds philosophically, "Mr. Eisman is always saying that every girl does not want to get ahead and get educated like me" (Blondes, 40). 1 Richard Ellman, James Joyce: 582; James Joyce, Letters I: 246; Gary Carey, Anita Loos: A Biography: 98, 108. Hereafter cited as Carey, with page number. 2 Quoted in Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, Mencken: The American Iconoclast (Oxford University Press, 2005): 245. 3 Anita Loos, Cast of Thousands (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1977): 85. Hereafter cited as Loos, with page number. 4 The Bookman 64, 3 (Nov. 1926): 341. 5 See, for example, Puck 61, 1571 (Apr.

10, 1907): 2; The National Police Gazette LXXIX, 1265 (Nov. 16, 1901): 3. 6 Anita Loos, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (New York: Liveright, 1973): 11-12. Hereafter cited as Blondes, with page number. 7 Susan Hegeman, "Taking Blondes Seriously." American Literary History 7, 3 (Autumn 1995): 525-554. Hereafter cited as Hegeman, with page number. 8 See Richard Bridgman, The Colloquial Style in America(New York: Oxford University Press, 1966) American Dreams: How Joyce and Faulkner Fell For a Blonde - The Daily Beast AMERICAN DREAMS American Dreams: How Joyce and Faulkner Fell For a Blonde The 1925 novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was a massive hit—everybody from the Prince of Wales to William Faulkner loved it—and personifies the Jazz Age.

Nathaniel Rich 03.29.15 10:45 AM ET A Philadelphia copywriter named Frances Gerety is credited with coining the phrase, “A Diamond Is Forever” for De Beers in 1947 . But a similar phrase served as a punchline more than twenty years earlier, in Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. “Kissing your hand may make you feel very very good,” observes Loos’s narrator, Lorelei Lee, “but a diamond and safire bracelet lasts forever.” It seems right that the line Advertising Age called “the slogan of the century” originated in Anita Loos’s novel. Lorelei Lee at least would have found it most intreeging. Loos’s premise is deceptively simple. The novel is the diary of a young blonde woman from Little Rock who has recently arrived in New York City. The gentlemen Lorelei meets—many of them titled, most of them married, all of them rich—attack her like flies on honey. They shower her with jewels, believing they will dazzle the country girl into submission, but Lorelei, despite lacking a particularly sophisticated lexicon (having never having attended colledge) outsmarts them all.

It’s not that she doesn’t love jewels. She’s obsessed with jewels. It’s just that she knows that the best way to maximize her jewelry collection is to maximize her gentlemen. From the lobby of the Ritz in New York City, where Lorelei is accustomed to meeting her gentlemen callers for lunch, the novel follows Lorelei and her friend Dorothy on a luxury passage to Europe, all expenses paid by a solicitous button magnate from Chicago (“I really love the Majestic because you would not know it was a ship because it is just like being at the Ritz.”); and later to the London Ritz, the Paris Ritz, and the Budapest Ritz. In London she sees the Tower of London, and in Paris she gets an eyeful of the Eyefull Tower. She dances with the Prince of Wales and is analyzed in Vienna by one Dr. Froyd, but the most intreeging sights of all are the hotel bars where she drinks champagne cocktails and the boutiques where, trailed by magnates, intellectuals, and noblemen, she discovers, to her delight, ever more expensive pieces of jewelry.

Most desirable of all is a diamond tiara, which one married suitor acquires for her at the price of $7,500 (about $100,000 in today’s dollars). “I have to admit,” writes Lorelei, “that everything always turns out for the best.” Going on synopsis alone the novel might appear a silly send-up of a foolish girl and her even more foolish admirers. But the synopsis leaves out the source of the novel’s enormous appeal. And enormous it was: in the first year after publication, it sold about one thousand copies a day in America alone, became a comic strip, a stage play (also written by Loos), and a film (released in 1928, a predecessor by twenty five years to the more famous Marilyn Monroe version; no trace remains). The novel did nearly as well abroad, where it was published in translation in more than a dozen countries, including China and the Soviet Union. The Prince of Wales, who was observed doubled over with laughter while reading it, bought copies for all his friends. The royal physician prescribed it to King George as a cure for melancholia. “It’s so successful I’m scared of it,” Loos told a reporter from the New Yorker.

“I’m even afraid of pencils these days.” The appeal was not merely popular. Edith Wharton called it the “Great American novel”; William Faulkner, in a fawning letter he sent Loos, expressed regret that he hadn’t thought of the idea first; other admirers included E.B. White, Sherwood Anderson, William Empson, and Rose Macauley. It was one of the only books that James Joyce, his eyesight fading, allowed himself to read while taking breaks from Finnegans Wake. Aldous Huxley said that Loos “the only woman in America he wanted to meet.” Arnold Bennett and H.G. Wells took her out to meals when she came to London. George Santayana called Gentlemen Prefer Blondes the best book of philosophy written by an American. It is an extremely funny book, and has remained funny for more than ninety years—almost definitely a world record. The humor sticks because the satire is not actually directed at Lorelei but at man’s lowest instincts, instincts that during the madly prosperous Twenties were allowed unprecedented indulgence.

“I wanted Lorelei to be a symbol of the lowest possible mentality of our nation,” wrote Loos in a forward to the novel’s 1963 edition. The men chasing Lorelei—statesmen, intellectuals, and titans of industry—are no less representative of this mentality. She does not even spare the writer who most forcefully exposed the era’s ludicrous excesses and inanities. Early in the novel Dorothy, the only girl in New York City less “refined” than Lorelei, is pursued by H.L. Mencken, “who really only prints a green magazine which has not even got any pictures in it.” In fact it was Mencken, a mentor to Loos, who inspired the novel in the first place. Loos, bewildered by the sight of so many of her intellectual male friends falling for ditzes, particularly blonde ones, was amazed to see that Mencken was bewitched by “the dumbest blonde of all.” No character better personifies America during the jazz age than Lorelei Lee—greedy, petty, frivolous, cunning, drunk on champagne.

Unlike peers who wrote about the immoderation of Twenties society in a darker vein—writers like Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Dreiser—Loos did not consider the crass materialism or childishness of the age a tragedy. She considered it an absurdity. She considered all human beings, in their essence, to be absurd. Her novel will continue to be funny as long as we remain so. Other notable novels published in 1925: Dark Laughter by Sherwood Anderson The Professor’s House by Willa Cather Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser The Great Gatsby by F.

Scott Fitzgerald Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis The 100 best novels: No 49 – Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos (1925) | Books | The Guardian The 100 best novels The 100 best novels: No 49 – Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos (1925) A guilty pleasure it may be, but it is impossible to overlook the enduring influence of a tale that helped to define the jazz age 'Repeated without irony'… Marilyn Monroe sings Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend in the 1953 film of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive Share on Messenger Close Anita Loos, a screenwriting Hollywood wunderkind, says she began to draft Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a jazz age classic, on the American railroad, as she crossed from New York to LA in the early 1920s. Travelling on the celebrated Santa Fe Chief with the movie star Douglas Fairbanks and his brainless leading lady, the young Loos became exasperated that a woman so stupid could "so far outdistance me in feminine allure".

Could this girl's secret, Loos wondered, possibly be rooted in her hair? "She was a natural blonde and I was a brunette." Lorelei Lee (aka Mabel Minnow from Little Rock, Arkansas) was born in that nano-second of female rivalry. Whipping out her yellow pad, Loos began drafting The Illuminating (originally Intimate) Diary of a Professional Lady, teasing fact and fantasy into an intoxicating depiction of "the lowest possible mentality" in prohibition America, a gold-digging blonde who is not – surprise, surprise – quite as dumb as she looks. No wonder that the part burst into life when Marilyn Monroe starred in the 1953 film version . Later, Loos joked that the plot of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was "almost as gloomy" as a Dostoevsky novel. Indeed, without Lorelei's faux-naif interior monologue, her tale is replete with hints of rape, actual murder, seduction, gangsterism, and courtesanship, spun into airy nothing.

When her diary begins, Lorelei is "under the protection" of the millionaire Gus Eisman, a Chicago button manufacturer, but in danger of falling in love with an impecunious British writer who wants to divorce his wife and marry the woman he believes to be his true love. When Eisman gets wind of this, he sends his mistress on a European tour with her hard-boiled friend Dorothy. Quickly bored with London, despite a dance with the Prince of Wales, they head for Paris ("devine") and its romantic attractions, especially "the Eyeful Tower". Yet the longer Lorelei's sentimental education continues, the more she recognises the truth: continental men are no match for Americans. "I really think," she writes, "that American gentlemen are the best after all, because kissing your hand may make you feel very, very good but a diamond-and-safire [sic] bracelet lasts for ever." This novella (it is barely 150 pages in my battered Penguin edition) falls into the category of "guilty pleasure", but I think it earns its place on this list, if only for the roll call of its distinguished contemporary fans, its lasting influence, and intensely quotable lines.

Long before Helen Fielding 's Bridget Jones, Loos hit on a young woman's diary as the perfect medium for satirical romance. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, serialised in Harper's Bazaar, became cult reading. Edith Wharton, probably tongue in cheek, hailed it as "the great American novel". Loos, an unreliable witness, claimed that James Joyce, who was losing his sight, saved his reading for Lorelei Lee. Who knows? It's a little book with a broad smile, and a deceptively big heart. A note on the text In her prime, in the 1920s, Anita Loos was "the Soubrette of Satire"and also boasted that her first screen credit was for an adaptation of Macbeth in which her billing followed immediately after Shakespeare's. The roaring success of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes owes an important debt to the celebrated critic and columnist, HL Mencken, a friend of Loos's.

"Menck", as she called him, had just left the editorship of The Smart Set for The American Mercury, and correctly saw that "making fun of sex" was the kind of risque novelty that would work better in a popular middlebrow publication like Harper's Bazaar. So Loos took her Lorelei material to the Harper's editor, Henry Sell, who encouraged Loos to extract maximum advantage from Lorelei's European trip. In just a few months, Gentleman Prefer Blondes became a magazine sensation. Newsstand sales of Harper's doubled, tripled and quadrupled. Then the publishers Boni and Liveright came calling, and made a contract for a slim hardback, illustrated by Ralph Barton. Blondes sold out at once as a runaway bestseller, becoming the second highest-selling book of 1926, and helping to define the jazz age for ever. A second edition of 60,000 copies was exhausted almost as quickly. Some 45 editions later (in the end, 80-plus), the book had passed into classic status. It would be translated into 14 languages, including Chinese.

Eventually, Lorelei's most memorable obiter dicta found their way into the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. The idea that "diamonds are a girl's best friend" passed into popular culture, and is now repeated without irony too often to be diverting. Loos herself lived long enough (she died in 1981) to describe her book as a "period piece" for the grandchildren of its first fans. "May they be diverted by the adventures of Lorelei Lee", she wrote, "and take courage from the words of her favourite philosopher: 'Smile, smile, smile.'" Three more from Anita Loos But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes (1928); A Girl like I (1966); Kiss Hollywood Goodbye (1974). Book club brings the Roaring '20s to Stanford with Anita Loos' Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Stanford Report, May 1, 2013 'Another Look' book club brings the Roaring '20s to Stanford with Anita Loos' Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Once Marilyn Monroe vamped "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend," the 1925 bestselling novel was all but forgotten.

Stanford hopes to restore the balance with its seasonal book club event. By Cynthia Haven Edith Wharton called Anita Loos' Gentlemen Prefer Blondes "the great American novel" and declared its author a genius. Winston Churchill, William Faulkner, George Santayana and Benito Mussolini read it – so did James Joyce, whose failing eyesight led him to select his reading carefully. The 1925 bestseller sold out the day it hit the stores and earned Loos more than a million dollars in royalties. Courtesy of the Anita Loos estate Anita Loos, whose novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes will be the topic of Stanford's Another Look book club's gathering on May 28. Everyone, of course, has heard of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but the short novel's fame was eclipsed by the 1953 movie of the same name, starring Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell. Once the bombshell blonde vamped "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend," the effervescent Jazz Age novel became a shard of forgotten history. Who has taken the send-up novel seriously since? Stanford's " Another Look " book club would like to restore the balance.

The book club launched by the English/Creative Writing Department is taking on the comic masterpiece at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, May 28, in the Stanford Humanities Center's Levinthal Hall. "Another Look" is a gift to the community – the event is free, open to the public, with no reservations required. The evening will be moderated by the English department's Hilton Obenzinger , well known for his "How I Write" series of conversations with authors (available on iTunes here ); he will be joined by English Professor Mark McGurl and Assistant Professor of English Claire Jarvis . Clearly, this spring will make the 1920s roar again. Beginning May 1, Gavin Jones , chair of the English Department, will discuss F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, a cautionary tale of the American Dream, at the Stanford Alumni Association's Book Salon . Also, a major motion picture of The Great Gatsby, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, opens in theaters on May 10.

But while Gatsby, published the same year as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, takes a grander, tragic look at the era, Loos revels in the pure nuttiness of two gold-diggers taking on New York City and Europe. Its story is told in a flapper's diary, with spelling and grammatical errors and verbal tics intact: A gentleman friend and I were dining at the Ritz last evening and he said that if I took a pencil and a paper and put down all of my thoughts it would make a book. This almost made me smile as what it would really make would be a whole row of encyclopediacs. I mean I seem to be thinking practically all of the time. I mean it is my favorite recreation and sometimes I sit for hours and do not seem to do anything else but think. So this gentleman said a girl with brains ought to do something else with them besides think. And he said he ought to know brains when he sees them, because he is in the senate and he spends quite a great deal of time in Washington, d. c., and when he comes into contract with brains he always notices it.

Thus begins Loos' story of two upbeat, fly-by-night con artists, Lorelei and her sidekick Dorothy. "Lorelei and Dorothy create a carnival wherever they go. They create moral havoc," writes Regina Barreca in the introduction to the Penguin edition, comparing Loos' creation to Shelley's Frankenstein. "They are powerful for the same reason Shelley's monster is powerful: They have nothing to lose." Obenzinger said the sequel But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes takes on a darker tone – drugs, prostitution, exploitation and organized crime make their appearance. But Loos' Gentlemen Prefer Blondes takes nothing seriously, putting the stereotypic ditzy blonde on the map and immortalizing the era's new woman, able to vote, smoke, dance and drink. "Lorelei is the female Huck Finn of the flapper era," said Obenzinger. "She is naive, shrewd and seemingly unaware as she exposes the absurdities and pretensions of boom-time capitalism," he said. "It's a hilarious send-up of new social dynamics, particularly the idea that women could get rich too through sexual manipulation." Loos was no Lorelei, however.

She said she would "always pass up a diamond for a laugh." She was born in Sisson, now Mount Shasta City, and grew up in San Francisco and San Diego. Much of her life story is to be taken with a grain of salt: trusted sources place her birth in 1888, 1893 or 1889. Each time she recalled receiving her first paycheck, she was younger, eventually claiming she started her professional writing career at 12. She was, in fact, 24. She also claimed to have written Gentlemen Prefer Blondes while still in her 20s. Not so; she was in her late 30s. More reliably, she had five decades as a New York playwright, a novelist, a short story writer and one of Hollywood's most respected and prolific screenwriters. But nothing captured the zeitgeist like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. H.L. Mencken, with whom she had a flirtatious relationship, triggered her most famous novel after he briefly turned his attentions to an undistinguished blonde. "Could her power, like that of Samson, have something to do with her hair?" Loos asked.

"I wanted Lorelei to be a symbol of the lowest possible mentality of our nation," she wrote of the book that was first published serially in Harper's Bazaar. Mencken became a fan: "This gay book has filled me with uproarious and salubrious mirth," he wrote in a review. "It is farce – but farce full of shrewd observation and devastating irony." Lorelei scribbles in her diary, "I mean champagne always makes me feel philosophical because it makes me realize that when a girl's life is as full of fate as mine seems to be, there's nothing else to do about it." But is Lorelei really as dumb as she sometimes seems? She is in control of her destiny. She gets her guy, she gets good times, she gets the diamond tiara she craves, she even dances with the Prince of Wales – and there's plenty of champagne along the way. The "Another Look" book club focuses on short masterpieces that have been forgotten, neglected or overlooked – or may simply not have received the attention they merit. The selected works are short to encourage the involvement of Bay Area readers whose time may be limited.

Registration at the website anotherlook.stanford.edu is encouraged for regular updates and details on the selected books and events. Cynthia Haven writes for the Stanford Department of English. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Summary - eNotes.com Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Summary link Link Subtitled The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady, Anita Loos’s novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is the story of Lorelei Lee, a former actress and social climber who makes her way into the glittering social life of the Jazz Age. Told in the first person, the novel takes the form of Lorelei’s diary and records events in the final months before her marriage to the wealthy Henry Spoffard. Lorelei’s adventures began at a secretarial college in her native city of Little Rock, Arkansas. Although she had been enrolled for only one week, Lorelei was immediately hired by a lawyer named Jennings. Though Loos does not say so, readers are to conclude that Jennings was more interested in Lorelei’s beauty than her clerical skills. When she discovered that Jennings was having an affair with another girl, Lorelei shot him and went on trial for assault. Charming both the judge and jury with her naïveté and physical charms, Lorelei was acquitted.

She moved to California, where she began to receive small roles in motion pictures and first assumed the name “Lorelei.” While working as an actress, she was discovered by Gus Eisman, the “Button King” of Chicago, who introduced her to members of his circle and began buying her increasingly lavish presents. Because of the narrator’s extreme innocence, Lorelei often does not understand that she is the butt of other people’s jokes. At one point, for example, her friend Dorothy says that it would be no more possible to lower Lorelei’s reputation than it would be to sink the Jewish navy (a force that was nonexistent when the novel was written). Rather than being insulted, Lorelei is flattered by Dorothy’s remark, taking it to mean that her virtue is unassailable. Though Lorelei... (The entire section is 726 words.) Get Free Access Start your free trial with eNotes for complete access to this resource and thousands more. 30,000+ Study Guides Save time with thousands of teacher-approved book and topic summaries. Get Homework Help Ask real teachers questions on any subject or search 300,000+ answers.

On the Go Access Anita Loos – sharp, shameless humour of the 'world's most brilliant woman' | Film | The Guardian Silent but deadly! Anita Loos – sharp, shameless humour of the 'world's most brilliant woman' The writer of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was an extraordinary, barbed genius of the silent era, Hollywood and Broadway Piquant wit … the screenwriter and novelist Anita Loos. Photograph: Everett/Rex/Shutterstock Monday 11 January 2016 08.24 EST Last modified on Tuesday 3 January 2017 06.54 EST Share on Messenger Close Anita Loos, the screenwriter and author, claimed – in typically waggish style – to be furious at the women’s lib movement. “They keep getting up on soapboxes and proclaiming that women are brighter than men,” she said. “That’s true, but it should be kept very quiet or it ruins the whole racket.” Loos was a veteran of silent-era Hollywood, when women worked at all levels of the film industry – directing, editing, producing and designing.

Scriptwriting, Loos’s forte, was the most feminine department: a “manless Eden” of female screenplay writers, scenario authors, story editors, intertitle artists and “script girls”. Loos may not have been the most successful screenwriter during Hollywood’s silent years (that honour falls to Frances Marion ), but she was one of its greatest wits, most popular characters and one of its key storytellers. Loos is best known today for her wickedly funny novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, written during her Hollywood years, which follows the escapades of gold-digging, flaxen-haired showgirl Lorelei Lee and her man-mad brunette chum Dorothy. For many, this breathless novel epitomises the highs and the lows of the jazz age , though it’s now most famous in its 1953 musical film incarnation starring Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell. Pinterest Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) The book is typical of Loos’s sharp and shameless humour: for all that Lorelei appears to be a mercenary and a “dumb blonde”, the real butts of the joke are the men who fall for her charms.

Loos was inspired to write it when she saw her friend, the literary critic and satirist HL Mencken , lose his cool when faced with a blond beauty. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes | Film Review Read more Gentlemen Prefer Blondes had been filmed before the musical, in 1928, when its roaring 20s satire would have been even more pointed. Loos, by then a fixture at Paramount, wrote the screenplay (with her husband, John Emerson ) and the intertitles (with Herman Mankiewicz , who would go on to write Citizen Kane ). The 1928 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes had impeccable comic credentials, being directed by Keystone alumnus Mal St Clair, and starring two more former employees of Mack Sennett: Ruth Taylor and Ford Sterling. Alice White picked up the part of sidekick Dorothy after Loos nixed the studio’s original, and intriguing, choice of Louise Brooks.

Brooks is said to have given a joyless performance in her screen test (“I stunk”), and Loos dismissed her, with an offensive turn of phrase that was, sadly, characteristic, saying: “If I ever write a part for a cigar-store Indian, you will get it.” The film was something of a flop, and we may never get to judge it for ourselves as it has long been considered lost. Pinterest Anita Loos and John Emerson reviewing an intertitle in 1919, the year they married. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock But Loos’s Hollywood story began more than a decade before Lorelei first shimmied on to the pages of Harper’s magazine, where her novel was originally serialised. As a young woman in California, Loos was an avid moviegoer, long before a trip to the nickelodeon was considered a cultural event. She had strong opinions about which films were better than others and fancied that she could make a fair fist of writing movies herself. Aged 24, she posted a short film scenario she had written to DW Griffith ’s Biograph studio in New York.

Not only did Griffith like The New York Hat , and pay her $25 for it, but the film he made from her story is one of his finest short features. Twenty-year-old Mary Pickford gives a typically nuanced performance in the lead role of a motherless child swept up in small-town scandal, and Lionel Barrymore makes his first screen performance as the local minister whose kindness causes the disgrace. By most people’s standards, The New York Hat would be precocious, but the vain Loos so often embroidered the truth that, in the telling of this story, she often claimed to have attained her movie debut as a teenager, even as young as 12 years old. Loos told some of the finest and funniest stories about Hollywood, but many should be taken with a sprinkling of salt. Pinterest The New York Hat (1912) Loos wrote many more scenarios for Griffith, posting them from her home in San Diego, where she lived with her mother. Some of them he used, but many he considered unfilmable as silent pictures.

“The laughs were all in the lines,” he complained, “there was no way to get them on to the screen.” For that very reason, he gave Loos the prestigious job of writing the intertitles for his epic Intolerance (1916) , a vast portmanteau film taking in a contemporary crime drama, the fall of the Babylonian empire, a Bible story and the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of 1572. Loos’s amusing, compact intertitles leaven the film’s heavy material with crisp dramatic statements and comical jibes such as: “When women cease to attract men they often turn to Reform as a second choice.” Loos had found an excellent way to exploit her natural skill with a one-liner.

A year later, Photoplay reported that Griffith had called her “The most brilliant woman in the world”, and praised her skilful writing, saying: “The most important service that Anita Loos has so far rendered the screen is the elevation of the subcaption [sic], first to sanity then to dignity and brilliance combined.” Pinterest His Picture in the Papers (1916) Loos became renowned for her cleverness at writing piquant intertitles, first for a series of Douglas Fairbanks ’s early films: her verbal wit a match for his physical gags. Four feet 11in tall, with a chic, gamine hairdo and a terribly expensive wardrobe, Loos was a distinctive presence and soon became as famous as many a movie star: the “soubrette of satire”. She had a collaborator by this time, the director John Emerson, to whom she was devoted and would later marry, although he was a notorious philanderer and far from her intellectual equal. Loos and Emerson worked as a writer-director team for many years.

Emerson often insisted on taking a screenwriting credit when the words were Loos’s alone, and there have even been some controversial suggestions that when Emerson was indisposed, Loos took his place behind the camera. When they worked in New York, they stayed at the Algonquin hotel, where Loos was friendly with, though not an insider in, Dorothy Parker’s famous Round Table. Pinterest Jean Harlow and Anita Loos in a publicity photo for Red Headed Woman. Photograph: Everett/Rex/Shutterstock Loos spent years as a successful Hollywood screenwriter, at Paramount, United Artists and MGM. She developed a knack for talent spotting, and moved happily into sound films, not least because the witticisms that were confined to titlecards in her silent movies found a home in fast-talking screenplays of the 30s. Fashion-obsessed, gossipy and loyal, she forged last Hollywood friendships with a number of stars, included those she “spotted”, from the Talmadge sisters (she wrote a very affectionate biography of them), to Jean Harlow and Paulette Goddard.

When Emerson’s health failed in 1937, she discovered that he had frittered away much of their income and requested a divorce, realising that after all she would have to make a success of her career alone. And she did. Pinterest The Women (1939) Loos died in her 90s, in 1981. Her legacy comprises a vast body of silent work, as well as sound-era successes including the sizzling pre-code flick Red-Headed Woman (1932) , starring Jean Harlow, and the breakneck cattiness of The Women (1939) . She also adapted her Gentlemen Prefer Blondes for a triumphant Broadway musical production starring Carol Channing in 1949, and two years later made a New York sensation of Colette’s Gigi, which ran for more than a year, with a young Audrey Hepburn in the lead role. Much of Loos’s writing success came from the fact that she was a born raconteur, the life and soul of many a Hollywood party, with a hawkish eye on the glamorous, or scandalous, events that surrounded her. Hence the pinpoint satire of Lorelei Lee.

In one of her biographical volumes, A Girl Like I, Loos wrote that: “I’ve enjoyed my happiest moments when trailing a Mainbocher evening gown across the sawdust-covered floor of a saloon.” Those Hollywood memoirs, while not always to be trusted, are among the most entertaining ever written, because Loos remains great company, and because her story proves how far a young woman in a young industry could get on brains and high spirits alone. Comedian Lucy Porter will talk on Anita Loos: Hollywood Pioneer at the Slapstick festival in Bristol on 22 January, which includes screenings of The New York Hat and The Mystery of the Leaping Fish. This event will be followed by a screening of the Douglas Fairbanks western Wild and Woolly, which Anita Loos co-wrote. Click here for tickets. Anita Loos - IMDb IMDb Writer | Producer | Actress While she is now best known for her book "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," Anita Loos was one of Hollywood's foremost early screenwriters.

She began writing screen scenarios for the 'Biograph Company' at an early age (though not 12, as she later claimed), and the first to be produced, The New York Hat (1912), was not only directed by the legendary D.W. ... See full bio » Born: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes - Anita Loos - Google Books Gentlemen Prefer Blondes 11 Reviews The delirious 1925 Jazz-Age classic that no less an authority than Edith Wharton called "the great American novel." If any American fictional character of the twentieth century seems likely to be immortal, it is Lorelei Lee of Little Rock, Arkansas, the not-so-dumb blonde who knew that diamonds are a girl's best friend. Outrageous, charming, and unforgettable, she's been portrayed on stage and screen by Carol Channing and Marilyn Monroe and has become the archetype of the footloose, good-hearted gold digger, with an insatiable appetite for orchids, champagne, and precious stones.

Here are her "diaries," created by Anita Loos in the Roaring Twenties, as Lorelei and her friend Dorothy barrel across Europe meeting everyone from the Prince of Wales to "Doctor Froyd"-and then back home again to marry a Main Line millionaire and become a movie star. In this delightfully droll and witty book, Lorelei Lee's wild antics, unique outlook, and imaginative way with language shine. What people are saying - Write a review User ratings LibraryThing Review User Review - SeriousGrace - LibraryThing This was a positively silly book and it almost embarrassed me to be reading it. Luckily, it was incredibly short (less than 200 pages) so I was able to get through it in one weekend. It is the journal ... Read full review LibraryThing Review User Review - GraceZ - LibraryThing I found this book to be very entertaining and extremely silly. Although i its short I had to read it in chunks because it started to grate on me after too much time, so it took a while. That said, the voice of the protagonist was endearing and funny and it was a great fun read.

Read full review Chapter One GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES 25 Chapter Three LONDON Is REALLY NOTHING 45 ChapterFve THE CENTRAL OF EUROPE 99 View all » Common terms and phrases ally American girls Anita Loos asked Bartlett became brains called CANDACE BUSHNELL cause Central of Europe champagne Coocoo cute debut delightful devine diamond tiara diary dinner discouradged Dorothy says Dorothy’s dozen orchids educated Eisman English everything famous feel ﬁlms ﬁnally ﬁnd ﬁnished ﬁrst ﬁve Foley Bergere French Froyd gentleman friend Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Gerry girl like Dorothy give Gwynn H. L.

Mencken Henry Henry’s father Henry’s sister imitation intreeged kissed knew Lady Francis Beekman landguage Little Rock London look Lorelei Louie and Robber Lulu luncheon Major Falcon marry mean Dorothy meet mind Miss Chapman Momart Montrose morning Munchen never papa Paris party Peggy Hopkins Joyce Piggie Prince of Wales Racquet Club Ritz Ritz hotel seems senario senshure Sir Francis Beekman Spof Spoffard squealing talk telephone tell thing thought tlemen told Dorothy took unreﬁned Vienna wanted yesterday York About the author (1998) Born in California, Anita Loos�(1893–1981) was herself a celebrity of the Jazz Age that produced Lorelei Lee. She began writing movie scripts by the time she was twelve, and before her death in 1981 she had written an enormous number of stories, screenplays, and more. She was also the author of an autobiography, A Girl Like I. Bibliographic information

Question: Who wrote the novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes?
Answer: Anita Loos