Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

by Anita Loos

Soon after its publication, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was admired and praised by many contemporary distinguished writers and critics: Aldous Huxley was “enraptured”; James Joyce couldn’t get off the couch for “three whole days” while reading it; on a cruise in the Aegean, Edith Wharton alternated between reading “The Odyssey or Blondes” and she hailed it as both “a masterpiece” and “the Great American Novel (at last!)”; George Santayana thought the book the preeminent work of philosophy by an American; Rose Macaulay called it “probably the funniest book that has appeared in England or America”; and H. L. Mencken, reviewing the book anonymously in the American Mercury, labeled it “a farce full of shrewd observation and devastating irony.”