The paperback series, “Such Friends”: The Literary 1920s, based on the blogs posted here, continues with the publication today of Volume IV, covering 1923, on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book formats. Signed copies will be available at Riverstone Books, Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh, PA, next week.
1923 offers four weddings and two funerals, an Egyptian curse, and a chance to stop Adolf Hitler! What more can you ask for in one year?!
“Such Friends” at the recent Greater Pittsburgh Festival of Books
In addition, Irish poet and playwright William Butler Yeats is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. English novelist Virginia Woolf is turning her short story, “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,” into a novel. American writer Gertrude Stein, living in Paris, is getting more recognition in the States. New York freelance writer Dorothy Parker is still writing light verse but also expanding into short stories.
The format of each book in the series lets you dip in and out, follow a favorite author, or read straight through from January 1st to December 31st.
Sample pages from Volume III of “Such Friends”: The Literary 1920s
On the occasion of “Such Friends” fourth book launch, I will make the same offer I have in the past: If you live on any Pittsburgh Regional Transit bus route, I will hand-deliver your personally signed copy.
Collect all four!
“Such Friends”: The Literary 1920s, Volume IV—1923
Later this month I will be talking about F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University.
Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
We interrupt this chronology of what was happening in the literary world 100 years ago to remind you that this Saturday, May 13th, 2023, is the second Greater Pittsburgh Festival of Books.
All books will be available at a substantial Festival discount and signed by the author. All four books are also available at regular retail price in both print and e-book format at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill and on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.
For all you fans of the first three volumes, there will be a special surprise—Stay tuned!
So come to the Festival at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary on Highland Avenue in East Liberty—admission is free with lots of parking available.
See you Saturday…
Everyone is reading “Such Friends”
Next month I will be talking about Fitzgerald and Hemingway at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University.
This is “a bloody shambles,” in the words of one spectator.
The annual Football Association Challenge Cup—the FA Cup—has been drawing smaller crowds ever since the end of the Great War.
So the Association thought they could hold this year’s final in the new stadium built for next year’s British Empire Exhibition on this site in Wembley. The stadium has been completed ahead of schedule, in only 300 days, just four days before this match, and it holds 125,000. That should be enough capacity. They won’t have to issue advance tickets.
FA Cup program
Boy, were they wrong.
Unusually beautiful weather and the fact that one of the London home teams is playing—West Ham United—combine to bring out over 115,000 local fans. And 5,000 or more supporters of the other side, Bolton Wanderers, take the train from Lancashire. Five more rent a plane and fly in from Manchester.
The gates open at 11:30 a. m. as planned and everything goes smoothly until around 1 p. m. when the crowd starts getting larger.
The roads surrounding the stadium are so filled, the Bolton team players get off their coach and walk the last mile.
The officials consider canceling the match but realize they will then have an angry crowd to deal with. At 1:45 p. m. they decide to close the gates, but after about a half hour of waiting, almost 75,000 fans left outside force their way in. Thousands in the lower tiers spill out onto the pitch.
At 2:45 p. m. King George V, 57, arrives, prepared to present the winning trophy at the end of the game. The crowd breaks into God Save the King and calms down.
King George V
The players finally enter the grounds a bit after 3 p.m. and try to help the police get the spectators off the field.
The local police send out calls for mounted police assistance and here comes off-duty Police Constable George Scorey, 40, astride Billy, a light grey horse. Scorey is concerned he won’t be able to disperse the crowd, but Billy comes to the rescue,
easing them back with his nose and tail until we got a goal-line cleared…He seemed to understand what was required of him,”
says Scorey. The game starts about 45 minutes late.
Billy helping with crowd control
About 1,000 people are injured, including two policemen; more than 20 are taken to hospital.
The police do their job and get the situation under control. The FA—not so much. They will have to refund money to those who were stuck outside.
Bolton beats West Ham, 2 nil. Bolton supporters celebrate in central London, jamming traffic around Piccadilly Circus.
*****
Ten days before, in New York City, at precisely 3 p. m., conductor John Philip Sousa, 68, marches the Seventh “Silk Stocking” Regiment Band, playing The Star-Spangled Banner, on to the brand new field at Yankee Stadium for baseball’s opening day.
John Philip Sousa
The musicians are followed by politicians and players from the Boston and New York teams; Yankee star Babe Ruth, 28, is presented with an over-sized bat. New York Governor Al Smith, 49, throws out the first ball and lands it right in the center of the catcher’s mitt.
Opening day at Yankee Stadium
For the past 10 years the Yankees have been playing at the Polo Grounds in upper Manhattan, but they were just leasing that space from their rivals, the New York Giants. Things came to a head last year when the two teams faced each other in the World Series and all the games had to be played there. The Giants won.
Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert, 55, had been looking for a new home for his team for years, and finally decided he would build and pay for it himself. Construction was finished in less than a year, and everything smells like new paint.
Babe Ruth and Jacob Ruppert
Baseball stadiums typically hold about 30,000 spectators; this one holds almost twice that. Today they announce attendance of 60,000, a new major league baseball record. Ruppert is betting that New York City can support three teams—Yankees, Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Ruth, who the Yankees bought from the Boston Red Sox three years ago, hits the first home run in the stadium, a three-run homer to the right field stands.
New York World sportswriter Heywood Broun, 34, quotes Ruth as dubbing the new Yankees home, “Some ball yard.”
Fred Lieb, 35, of the New York Evening Telegram calls it “The House That Ruth Built.”
This summer I will be talking about F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University.
Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
We interrupt this chronology, “Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, for a tip of the hat to all our local independent bookstores.
This Saturday, April 29, 2023, if you’re lucky enough to live near Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh, PA, you could wander on over to Riverstone Books on Forbes Avenue and get your signed copy of “Such Friends”: The Literary 1920s. Waiting for you are Volumes I through III, covering 1920 through 1922, along with great Independent Bookstore Day merch.
Riverstone Books merch
If you’re not near Squirrel Hill, go to your local independent bookstore and demand that they carry all three volumes now! (Tell them to email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.)
All three volumes of “Such Friends”: The Literary 1920s
And if you live anywhere near a Pittsburgh Regional Transit route, I’ll come sign them for you.
While you’re out and about, stop by your local independent café also.
If you are not lucky enough to have an independent bookstore near you—start one! (And you can still order “Such Friends”: The Literary 1920s from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.)
This summer I will be talking about F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University.
Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
Lying in her sickbed, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, 31, knows she is luckier than she has ever been.
Millay spent the last two years in Paris and rural England, supporting herself with free-lance writing assignments. She thought that, when she came back to New York City at the beginning of the year, her stomach problems would go away once she stopped eating all that rich French food.
But her internal ailments are sometimes worse, and her friends all agree that she looks like hell.
Since her return, Millay has been living at 156 Waverly Place in Greenwich Village in an apartment owned by a wealthy woman she met in England, Esther Sayles Root, 28, who lives upstairs and has been taking care of Millay. Root has also been taking care of Millay’s friend, top Manhattan columnist Franklin Pierce Adams (FPA), 41, who taunts his wife by mentioning his affairs—including Esther—in his column frequently.
156 Waverly Place
Recently, Esther convinced Edna to come up here for a country weekend, with some of their artsy friends from the Village.
Esther Sayles Root
Playing charades during a party one night, Millay was teamed up with one of the neighbors, rich Dutch businessman—and attractive widower—Eugen Boissevain, 43. The two were supposed to act out a young couple falling in love. Everyone in the room could tell that neither of them was acting.
Eugen Boissevain
At the end of the weekend, Esther went back to the Village and Edna moved in here with Eugen, his chauffeured car and house servants.
Boissevain is taking such good care of Millay. He personally drives her into the city when she has a doctor’s appointment, and has his servants wait on her here at home.
Overall, despite her persistent stomach pain, Millay feels that she is on the verge of something bigger and better.
This summer I will be talking about F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University.
Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.ukin both print and e-book versions.
Ohioan Sherwood Anderson, 46, had his fourth novel, Many Marriages, published last month. His first appeared seven years ago, around the time he embarked on a second marriage, to sculptor Tennessee Mitchell, now 49.
Many Marriages by Sherwood Anderson
The review in the New York Herald, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 26, currently working on his third novel, was positive. In “Sherwood Anderson on the Marriage Question,” Fitzgerald said he thinks Many Marriages is Anderson’s best work.
Henry Seidel Canby, 44, in the New York Evening Post declares,
if we are to have an American Thomas Hardy, [Sherwood Anderson] is the man.”
Those leading crusades against “dirty books” are not as impressed. Because Anderson’s work deals with sexual freedom, they have linked it with other contemporary novels such as Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence, 37, which they have tried to ban.
However, today’s issue of Time magazine points out that when Many Marriages was serialized in a magazine, there was resounding praise. Now that it is a hardback book, many find it boring—including Edmund Wilson, 27, in The Dial; Burton Rascoe, 30, in the New York Tribune; and the dean of Manhattan columnists, FPA [Franklin Pierce Adams], 41, in the New York World.
Burton Rascoe by Gene Markey
But Sherwood is pleased with a complimentary letter he has received from his mentor and friend in Paris, American ex-pat writer Gertrude Stein, 49, who likes Many Marriages.
Gertrude Stein
Stein has praised him privately and in print before, including her recent piece in The Little Review, “Idem the Same: A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson,” which says, in the section titled, “A Very Valentine,”:
Very fine is my valentine.
Very fine and very mine.
Very mine is my valentine very mine and very fine.
Very fine is my valentine and mine, very fine very mine and mine is my valentine.”
To hear Gertrude Stein read the complete poem, click here.
This summer I will be talking about Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University.
Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
This summer I will be talking about F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University.
Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
Henry R. Luce, 24, knows how this day is going to pan out.
Henry R. Luce
Luce and his partner, fellow Yale alum Briton Hadden, just turned 25, have been planning their magazine for well over a year. Now they are coming down to the deadline to start the presses so the new magazine, Time, will appear on newsstands with a March 3rd cover date.
Serious discussions hadn’t started until Hadden, then learning the publishing ropes from editor Harold Bayard Swope, 41, at the New York World, contacted his old buddy from the Yale Daily News, Luce, who had recently been dumped by the Chicago Daily News. He suggested they both go to work for the Baltimore News.
Briton Hadden
In late night talks they began brainstorming the concept of a weekly magazine called Facts which would condense the important news of the day for busy businessmen. Eventually, they came up with the name Time, and the slogan, “Take Time—It’s Brief.” Hadden thought it should be fun as well as informative, including news, celebrities, politics, culture and sport.
Funded by $100,000 raised from other Yale alumni, and working out of this abandoned brewery, Hadden, as editor, is overseeing the process he and Luce learned in their short publishing careers: Get the flats together. Race over to the printer at 36th Street and 11th Avenue. Stay up all night with the staff writing copy to fill holes and cutting copy to make columns fit. Then write captions for the three-inch square fuzzy photos.
Within the 32 pages—including the cover featuring retiring congressman and former Speaker of the U. S. House of Representatives Joseph G. Cannon, 86—were brief pieces on:
The Kansas legislature considering a bill to make smoking illegal;
The wife of the Pennsylvania governor beseeching Congress to put women in charge of enforcing Prohibition, which cost the country $15 million last year;
Charges by muckraker Upton Sinclair, 44, that department stores have too strong an influence over newspapers because of their heavy advertising spends;
Influential British art critic Clive Bell, 41, declaring that cubism is dead;
A review of Black Oxen, the new novel by Gertrude Atherton, 65, which categorizes the writers who lunch regularly at the midtown Algonquin Hotel as “Sophisticates”; and
A review of the hit Broadway play, Merton of the Movies, by two of those Sophisticates, Marc Connelly, 32, and George S Kaufman, 33, calling it a “skillful dramatization” of the original novel.
This month I am talking about the literary 1920s in Paris and New York City in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University.
Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
Oh no! All those bookish friends of yours couldn’t figure out that what you were really hankering for was“Such Friends”: The Literary 1920s, Volumes I through III covering 1920 through 1922!
“Such Friends”: The Literary 1920s—Volume I, 1920
Easily available in print or e-book format on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. However, if you prefer signed copies, wander on over to Riverstone Books on Forbes Avenue in Squirrel Hill. Or contact me directly at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.
The reason you are so keen to get your hands on all three volumes of “Such Friends” is clear from what you’ve heard people saying about it:
My wife and I were reading your Such Friends…out loud to each other and laughing a lot.”
–Cliff, Osher Lifelong Learning friend
Everyone is reading “Such Friends”:
Donnelly’s clever day-by-day organization allows her to range widely among many artists while her use of the present tense creates a sense of immediacy—’you are there.’ This book will provide great pleasure to anyone interested in figures of Modernism and of Twenties popular culture: Eliot, Joyce, Pound, Woolf, Yeats, Stein, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Parker, Benchley, et al.”
—another Kathleen, Facebook friend
Here’s an example of my clever organization:
Sample pages from “Such Friends”: The Literary 1920s
Your lovely book arrived yesterday and I’ve already devoured most of it. It’s a very clever way of dealing with so many literary giants in…their most important years. Although ideal for a popular audience there is much that I did not know (and was delighted to learn) even though I spent a wasted youth and much of my dotage studying most of them.”
—Joseph, Australian friend
And my previous offer still stands: If you are anywhere near a Pittsburgh Regional Transit bus route, I will hand-deliver your signed copies. Get in touch! kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.
Next month I will be talking about The Literary 1920s in Paris and New York City at the Osher program at Carnegie-Mellon University.
Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
Free-lance writer Dorothy Parker, 29, is worrying about how to handle the regular book club that she is hosting this evening here at her apartment.
Sixth Avenue and West 57th Street
They all will have heard; she lunches at the Algonquin Hotel most days with one of the regulars, New York Times reporter Jane Grant, 30, and her husband American Legion Weekly editor Harold Ross, also 30. Parker knows the writers who congregate there have been spreading rumors and trying to figure out why she did it.
Dottie is thinking it will be best to take the direct approach. She’ll greet each guest saying,
I slashed my wrists.”
That should get over some of the awkwardness.
That Sunday she had arrived back here at her apartment feeling really hungry. She called down and ordered delivery from that vile—but convenient—restaurant downstairs, the Swiss Alps.
When she went into the bathroom Parker saw the razor left behind by her estranged husband Edwin Pond Parker III, 29, when he took off to his family back in Connecticut last summer. She hadn’t noticed it before.
Parker took the blade and cut along the vein in her left wrist. Blood spurted all over the room. Her hand was so slippery she had a hard time slitting the other wrist.
And then the delivery boy arrived with dinner.
Call a doctor!”
Dottie shouted. The ambulance took her to Presbyterian Hospital.
Some of her friends’ comments around the lunch table have gotten back to her.
Playwright Marc Connelly, 32, thinks it was “just a bit of theatre.” A few feel Parker was looking for attention, or to have Eddie come back. Jane Grant is suspicious of the fortuitous arrival of the delivery boy.
Dorothy and Eddie Parker
Her family and some of her lunch friends came to visit Parker in the hospital. Dean of the New York columnists Franklin Pierce Adams (FPA), 41, stayed away. Connelly came; as did theatre critic Alexander Woollcott, about to turn 36. Most important of all was the visit from her best friend, Life magazine editor Robert Benchley, 33.
Eddie didn’t even keep his razors sharp,”
she told him.
In the hospital Parker had tied pale blue ribbons into little bows around the scars on her wrists. For the bridge club tonight, Dottie decides to use black velvet ribbons.
Next month I will be talking about the literary 1920s in Paris and New York City in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University.
Manager as Muse,about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
SuchFriends Blog 