Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy, A Lost Generation Love Story

Updated June 26, 2020 | Infoplease Staff

The story of Gerald and Sara Murphy has been told before, by Calvin Tomkins and their daughter, Honoria Murphy Donnelly, but the earlier volumes don't come close to the grace and significance of Everybody Was So Young, the biography of the beautiful couple. Gerald was heir to the Mark Cross luxury leather-goods fortune and Sara the daughter of a fabulously wealthy industrialist, Frank Bestow Wiborg. The Murphys lived the charmed life, fleeing their wealthy, controlling families that didn't approve of their union, for Paris and Antibes, where they socialized with and patronized the likes of Picasso, Hemingway, Fitzgerald. Not only did they finance the artists, the Murphys were the inspiration for Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night and Picasso's “Woman in White.” The death of their two sons shattered their idyllic life and ended their European honeymoon. Vaill deftly captures a magical period enlivened by remarkable figures.