Based on ten years of research, with exclusive access to the Beach family papers, this is a true literary chronicle of the glittering twenties and thirties ¨The lost Gerneration¨, rich in untold anecdotes about Joyce, Hemingway, and others. Professor Fitch has interviewed more than fifty persons and corresponded with dozens more.
This book fills in the important gaps in Beach's own memoirs, which are full of polite compliments and guarded half-truths. We learn the strange details of Beach's odyssey from a parsonage in Princeton to the Left Bank, the secret suicide of her mother, and the long, intimate relationship between Beach and Adrienne Monnier. For the first time, the author reveals the circumstances of the bitter break between Beach and Joyce.