BOBBED HAIR AND BATHTUB GIN: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties
Marion Meade
Doubleday
Literary Criticism and Collections
ISBN: 0385502427

Sex. Drugs. Booze. Wild parties. No, it's not another rock-and-roll band tell-all. It's Marion Meade's intelligent, juicy and thoroughly entertaining BOBBED HAIR AND BATHTUB GIN.

Meade's latest effort recounts in luscious detail the lives, loves, closeted skeletons and tormented souls of Zelda Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker and Edna Ferber --- literary figures whose stars burned brightly and whose legends took form in the period in American history bracketed by the end of World War One and the beginning of the Great Depression.

BOBBED HAIR AND BATHTUB GIN is divided into eleven chapters, each covering a single year from 1920 to 1930. The four women form the core of the narrative, which spirals outward as it advances through the decade of the Roaring Twenties to include a host of figures that swarmed around New York City's journalism, theater and publishing hives. Variously entwined and entangled with the women at the center of the giddy gin- and hormone-fueled maelstrom are dozens of familiar names, including Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, and other members of the notorious Algonquin Roundtable; H. L. Mencken; and of course, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Meade's exhaustive research and crisp writing have produced a work that is at once a fascinating history of the American literary scene in the Twenties and a sensational beach read, a thinking-person's soap opera. A welcome antidote to the assorted dullards and contrived situations of reality television, BOBBED HAIR AND BATHTUB GIN delivers smart, extraordinarily talented real people, human beings with the obsessions, neurosis and psychological baggage that are part of the requisite chemistry of artistic genius, literary or otherwise.

In their twenties during the Twenties, Zelda Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker and Edna Ferber were, like their contemporaries, people who gleefully ignored inconvenient laws and problematic social conventions. They were at various times heartbreakers and heartbroken. The men in their lives acted either as the hero/protector, or like navigationally challenged birds that fly into windowpanes.

As a kind of who's who of American writers of the era, BOBBED HAIR AND BATHTUB GIN offers a compelling portrait of a unique period in American cultural history. While many of the real-life characters in this wonderful book ultimately found something less than happy endings, one feels perhaps a greater sense of loss for the passing of an era when print was king and writers were revered as stars in their own right. (It must also be observed, however, that they were also the subjects of a level of public interest and scrutiny that made Scott and Zelda the Ben and J-Lo of their day.)

H. G. Wells, who makes a brief appearance at a party in BOBBED HAIR AND BATHTUB GIN, was, of course, the author of THE TIME MACHINE. In a profound and thoroughly engaging way, author Marion Meade has provided readers with the means to travel back to 1920 and witness the lives of four women whose voices, vices and literary virtues added to the roar. It is a journey well worth the effort.

   --- Reviewed by Bob Rhubart

• Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.