Living Well Is the Best Revenge

Calvin Tomkins’s classic account of the lives of Gerald and Sara Murphy, two American expatriates who formed an extraordinary circle of friends in France during the 1920s—now with a new foreword by Anna Wintour.

First published in 1971, Living Well Is the Best Revenge is Calvin Tomkins’s now-classic account of the lives of Gerald and Sara Murphy, two American expatriates who formed an extraordinary circle of friends in France during the 1920s. First in Paris and then in the seaside town of Antibes, they played host to a cast of some of the most memorable artists and writers of the era, including Cole Porter, Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Ernest Hemingway, and Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

It was in Paris that Gerald Murphy first encountered Cubist painting, which prompted him to embark on an all-too-brief career as a painter—roughly from 1922 to 1929—during which he produced fifteen works, seven of which survive, and every one of which is a unique American modernist masterpiece. Despite the brevity of Murphy’s oeuvre, the intensity of its conception and its recently acknowledged status as a crucial precedent to Pop art have elevated Murphy’s reputation considerably.

Illustrated with nearly seventy photographs from the Murphys’ family album and with a special section on Murphy’s paintings, Living Well presents a fascinating Lost Generation chronicle as charming and enticing as the couple themselves.