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GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES

Anita Loos

The literary classic that inspired the iconic Marilyn Monroe filma brilliant satire of the Roaring Twenties that follows a wide-eyed blonde and her cynical brunette friend as they take Europe by storm, now with an introduction by Marlowe Granados to celebrate the book's 100th anniversary!

Some might call Lorelei Lee lucky. Others, names she would not even put in her diary. Life in New York is becoming routine, so when her wealthy companion Mr. Eisman suggests that "a girl with brains ought to do something else with them besides think," Lorelei is up to the challenge.

Accompanied by her best friend Dorothy Shaw, Lorelei chronicles the sights and people of Europe in her diary in a consistent mix of hilarity and accidental wisdom"Paris is divine" and "London is really nothing at all." Reliant on the good graces of the gentlemen around them to stay afloat as they await Eisman's arrival on the continent, Lorelei and Dorothy skirt unscathed and at times oblivious around scorned and greedy lovers, plots of Francophone thievery, and even murder charges.

This hilarious, rip-roaring travelogue is a sharp-eyed takedown of the hypocrisy of Prohibition, the Roaring Twenties, and anyone foolish enough to stake their wallet on the dumb blonde stereotype. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is more than a guilty pleasureit is a literary classic.

Born in California, Antia Loos (1893 - 1981) was a prolific screenwriter, playwrtight, and author.
Jenny McPhee is the author of A Man of No Moon, No Ordinary Matter, and The Center fo Things. She lives in London.

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Book Published 2025-08-05 by Modern Library

Comments

Anita Loos's sharp and very funny send-up of the 1920s jet setwhich, of course, was made into the 1953 classic starring Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroeturns 100 this year, but as this special edition (with a new introduction by Marlowe Granados) reminds us, great storytelling never goes out of style. Even at a century old, Loos's portraits of millionaires, criminals, and not-so-dumb blondes feels fresh and important. Should you rewatch the film? Absolutely. But perhaps reread the book first.

Cheeky . . . Think: the zany surrealism of the Marx Brothers crossed with the desireboth sexual and materialof Sex and the City. No wonder James Joyce was one of the novel's many highbrow modernist fans. . . . In this retro era of cottagecore, trad wives and puffed-sleeved prairie dresses galore, how fun it is to travel back to the dawn of the modern age and revel in the giddy freedoms of flapperdom.

[Gentlemen Prefer Blondes] is so funny it made my hair go even more platinum.

Just hilarious, and very briefyou'll read it today and you might finish it tonight because you're not going to be able to put it down. . . . Much more satirical than you would imagine from the movie, much darker in its way . . . Just a brilliant, brilliant book.

Between the lines of this fizzy little plot is the point that makes Gentlemen Prefer Blondes as fresh today as it was in 1925: This is a story about business that's pretending to be a story about sex.