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wahistorian 's review for:
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
by Anita Loos
I just learned that Edith Wharton was the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1921 for ‘The Age of Innocence.’ In 1925 Anita Loos, first woman screenwriter in Hollywood, published a series of sharp-tongued magazine articles in the form of diary entries penned by Lorelei Lee. At 15 Lee had escaped Little Rock, Arkansas and landed in New York City, where she quickly learned to live on her sex appeal by running a series of grifts on men hoping to bed her. Lee insisted she was not a flapper, raised as a Christian Scientist by a father who was a well-known Elk back in Little Rock. But she’s not averse to taking a Prohibition-era drink or luring a date into a breach of promise suit. Her confidence never wavers nor does her desire to improve herself, and with the sponsorship of Mr. Eisman, her regular beau, she travels to London, Paris, and Central Europe. She is analyzed by “Dr. Froyd” who is unable to do much with her and learns enough French to drink with “squeaking” Frenchmen. By the end of the novel she may have parlayed her new knowledge and connections into a profession slightly more certain and less grasping than her minute-to-minute cons. Read in the context of George Gissing’s ‘The Odd Women,’ ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’ brings home the ways in which women of the 1920s were a universe away from their mothers in the late 19th century: gone is the fear, but also the morality and self-examination that kept the New Women of the 1890s trapped in loveless marriages.