Title:: [[Gentlemen Prefer Blondes]] Authors:: [[Anita Loos]] Tags:: #ficiton #farce Read:: [[2022-11-26]] ## Editions - Edition:: [[Penguin Books]], 1998 - Original Copyright:: 1925 - Pages:: 122 ## Annotations Timelessly funny but surely more hilarious to readers in 1925. One review from the time: “This gay book has filled me with uproarious and salubrious mirth.” (Translates to “I LOL’d”) Loos was friends with HL Mencken and the book was partly inspired by his proclivity for a “witless blonde.” (The character of Lorelei in particular is modeled after “the dumbest blonde of all, a girl who had bewitched one of the keenest minds of our era—HL Mencken.”). In the introduction, Loos describes a scene on a cross country train ride where she witnesses men fall over themselves to help a blonde woman, noting that she was equally as beautiful but didn’t receive similar attention. She writes that she “stumbled onto an important scientific fact which had never before been pinpointed.” That revelation became the title of the book.  What’s really impressive is the critical reception from Loos’s contemporaries. Edith Wharton called it “the great American novel (at last!)” Faulkner wrote Loos expressing his jealousy that he hadn’t invented one of the main characters, and James Joyce allegedly couldn’t get off the couch while reading it. (I didn’t read But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes)