Bright Young People The Lost Generation of London's Jazz Age [Paperback]

The modern obsession with celebrity began with the Bright Young People, a voraciously pleasure-seeking band of bohemian party-givers and blue-blooded socialites who romped through the gossip columns of 1920s London. Drawing on the virtuosic and often wrenching writings of the Bright Young People themselves, the biographer and novelist D. J. Taylor has produced an enthralling account of an age of fleeting brilliance.

D. J. Tayloris a literary critic and the author of two acclaimed biographiesThackerayandOrwell: The Life, which won the Whitbread biography prize in 2003and six novels, includingKept: A Victorian Mystery. He lives in Norwich, England.

[Taylor] tells this story with a good deal ofessayistic flair, precision and flyaway wit. Just as important, he relates this ultimately elegiac narrative with a surprising amount of intellectual and emotional sympathy. Dwight Garner, The New York Times

[An]incisive social history. . . [A]richly detailed work. Caryn James, The New York Times Book Review

InBright Young PeopleTaylor is writingsplendid social history, not fiction, and he brings a more tempered and rueful approach, showing the sadness beneath an entire generation's compulsion to waste its promise and dance in the spotlight. Scott Fitzgerald, a writer admired by Waugh (who was no soft touch), called his own lost' contemporaries the beautiful and damned'; here, Taylor makes us feel the full force of the reckoning implied in that sad conjunction . . .Taylor has a nice way with a one-liner--The books Brian Howard never wrote would fill a decent-sized shelf'--and isexcellenton the evolution of BYP argot . . . By placing generational tensions and tenderness center-stage, Taylor gives his booka beating emotional heart. Richard Rayner, Los Angeles Times Book Review

That rarest of books--one you can safely recommend bothlCx