This week's lost in the stacks book is a haphazard choice. I haven't had a chance to do much browsing so I had to just choose an author more or less. I've long wanted to read Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes as it somehow seems like a representative work of the 1920s Flapper lifestyle, and this is a period that is always of interest to me. My library has a number of her works, but A Girl Like I caught my attention, so it came home with me.
Anita Loos was born in California in 1888. Her father owned a newspaper, but it sounds like he wasn't the best provider so Anita helped the family financially by becoming a stage actress. It was writing that she preferred to do and began with short pieces submitted to newspapers in California, but she soon turned her talents to writing screenplays and later Broadway musicals. It blossomed into full time work, and she was a very prolific writer. Her film and Broadway credits run from 1912 through the mid-1950s. She was a contributor to Vanity Fair for a number of years and her sketches for Harpers Bazaar about the escapades of a Flapper named Lorelei Lee became Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. It wasn't a huge critical success but it was immensely popular with the reading public, risqué for the time, though rather tame by today's standards.
She was also a memoirist, and A Girl Like I is only one of several that she published. It sounds like a breezy, chatty sort of read--very gossipy of Hollywood life and the glitterati of that era. It garnered a favorable review in the New York Times.
"Her one great ambition never to be bored is evident. This is no tired senior citizen (she was 70s when she wrote it) writing her memoirs but a gifted wit who has seen the best of many worlds. The sex in the first flapper era of the Twenties was pretty tame, she says, held up to the sixties. 'How could any epoch boast of passion with its hit love song bearing the title When You Wore a Tulip, A Bright Yellow Tulip and I Wore a Red, Red Rose?' Although there were no four-letter words in the Loos opus, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, it was a shocker when it came out in 1926."
Anyway, this could be a fun read in the same way Gentlemen Prefer Blondes would be--to get a look into a vanished time from someone who lived it.