Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos (important jazz age novel)

Published by Picador, 1974, softcover, 156 pages, condition: very good.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: The Intimate Diary of a Professional Lady (1925) is a comic novel written by American author Anita Loos. The story follows the dalliances of a young blonde gold-digger and flapper named Lorelei Lee during "the bathtub-gin era of American history." Published the same year as F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Carl Van Vechten's Firecrackers, the lighthearted work is one of several notable 1925 American novels focusing on the carefree hedonism of the Jazz Age.

Originally serialized as sketches in Harper's Bazaar during the spring and summer of 1925, Boni & Liveright republished Loos' sketches in book form in November 1925. Although dismissed by critics as "too light in texture to be very enduring," the book garnered the praise of many writers, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, William Faulkner, and H. G. Wells, Edith Wharton hailed Loos' satirical work as "the great American novel" as the character of Lorelei Lee embodied the avarice and self-indulgence that characterized 1920s America during the presidencies of Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge.

Loos' book became the second-best selling title of 1926 in the United States and a runaway international bestseller. It was printed worldwide in over 13 languages, including Russian and Chinese. By the time Loos died of a heart attack in 1981 at the age of 93, the work had been printed in over 85 editions and adapted into a 1926 comic strip, a 1928 silent comedy, a 1949 Broadway musical, and a 1953 film adaptation of the musical.