This is an exuberant group portrait of four extraordinary writers–Zelda Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, and Edna Ferber–whose loves, lives, and literary endeavors captured the spirit of the 1920s.

Marion Meade re-creates the aura of excitement, romance, and promise of the 1920s, when these literary heroines did what they wanted, said what they thought, and kicked open the door for twentieth-century women, setting a new model for every woman trying to juggle the serious issues of economic independence, political power, and sexual freedom.

But Meade also brings to light the anxiety and despair that lurked beneath the nonstop partying and outrageous behavior. She describes the men who influenced them, loved them, and sometimes betrayed them. And while she describes their social and literary triumphs, she also writes movingly of the penances they paid.

A vibrant mixture of literary scholarship, social history, and scandal, Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin is a rich evocation of an era that will forever intrigue and captivate us.

She was known for her outrageous one-liners, her ruthless theater criticism, her clever verses and bittersweet stories. But there was another side of Dorothy Parker: a private life set on a course of destruction through two divorces, a string of painful affairs, a lifelong problem with alcohol, and several suicide attempts.

In this lively, absorbing biography, Marion Meade illuminates both sides of the fascinating Parker: her dark days, as well as her days in the sun at the Algonquin Round Table with Robert Benchley, George Kaufman, and Harold Ross and in Hollywood with S. J. Perelman, William Faulkner, and Lillian Hellman. At the dazzling center of it all, Meade gives us the flamboyant, self-destructive, and brilliant Dorothy Parker.

After forty years in the spotlight as comedian, author, director, and professional neurotic, Woody Allen is a living legend. To fans, his films have always represented a sort of ongoing autobiography. This is the first uncensored biography to investigate one of our era’s most celebrated, distinctive, and confounding filmmakers.

For over three decades, the creator of films such as Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Deconstructing Harry successfully maintained his privacy while sustaining his comic public persona based on that private self. Not until his scandalous relationship with Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter, Soon-Yi, did Allen’s precarious balancing act of self and celebrity collapse in public view. Based on exclusive interviews, this sensitive yet rigorous biography reveals the personal side of a talented artist and troubled man.