'Such Friends'

"America was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history and there was going to be plenty to tell about it."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald

That was 100 years ago. So here we are again. At the beginning of the Twenties. Will this be a similar decade?

There's one way to tell: To look back at certain points and document what was happening a century before.

Based in part on her Ph.D. research at Dublin City University, in "Such Friends": The Literary 1920s, Vol. 1-1920, Kathleen Dixon Donnelly chronicles the events of the first year of the decade that included and affected the creative people in the four main writers' salons in the English-speaking Western world:

• William Butler Yeats and the Irish Literary Renaissance,
• Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group,
• Gertrude Stein and the Americans in Paris, and
• Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table,

as well as writers and supporters of the arts who were important to the time such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ezra Pound and others. They ate, they drank, they neglected their families. They praised and berated each other privately and publicly; they bickered endlessly. They complained about money and few had day jobs. And they talked. And talked. You can dip in and out of the vignettes in "Such Friends," search to see if your birthday is included, look for mentions of your favorite writers, or read it all straight through from January 1st to December 31st.