<i>Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild In The Twenties</i> by Marion Meade

It acts as a decade long biography of some of the decades most poignant female authors: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, Zelda Fitzgerald, & Edna Ferber.

Meade does a fantastic job of interweaving the author’s personal and social lives. Mead accomplishes a fantastic factual account of the writer’s triumphs and tribulations in relation to the art they produced. As socially and academically predominant women of the early 20th century, they roamed in the same cliques. These women’s familiarity with each another helps tie together the story of their lives. In the same way, the reflection of their personal strife on the work they produced in order to survive as artists is profoundly moving. Meade uses this to directly tie in the difficulty women had excelling as writers and how they used their setbacks to fuel their career zeal.

The main problem with this entire book is that it stops upon the onset of the Depression. It’s apparent that you cannot continue a story set in a certain time period, once the time frame ends, but I would like to have a similarly detailed account of what happened to these women as their lives continued or ended.

Review by Sabrina