Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925) & But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes (1927)

[There's a nice hardcover edition of the two novellas available for $5.95 on hamiltonbook.com. ISBN is 9781435173170. Flat rate shipping is $5, no matter how many books you order at one time.]

Corinne Anita Loos (April 26, 1888 – August 18, 1981) was an American actress, novelist, playwright and screenwriter. In 1912, she became the first female staff screenwriter in Hollywood, when D.W. Griffith hired her. Beside Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, she is also known for her screenplay of the 1939 adaptation of The Women, and her 1951 Broadway adaptation of Colette's novella Gigi.

Most people know only the fluffy Marilyn Monroe film, but Anita Loos' novella was hailed as "the great American novel" by Edith Wharton and heaped with praise by many other authors including James Joyce, E.B. White, William Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, Rose Macaulay, and H.G. Wells. George Santayana, the Spanish-American philosopher, facetiously averred that Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was "the best book on philosophy written by an American.

The 1925 comic novella (only 90 pages) is subtitled "The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady". It recounts the dalliances of a young blonde gold-digger and flapper, Lorelei Lee, during the bathtub-gin era of American history." Lee embodied the avarice and self-indulgence that characterized 1920s America, much of which was a reaction to the terrible losses of WW1 and the Spanish Flu epidemic. (The 1953 Monroe version toned down considerably the sexual promiscuity in the book to appease the 1950s film censors.)

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes became an instant success the moment it hit bookstores in November 1925 and sold out all copies on the day it was released. A second edition of 60,000 copies sold out within the next thirty days. Afterward, the novel sold an average of 1,000 copies per day. Loos' work became the second-best selling US title of 1926 (after The Private Life of Helen of Troy by John Erskine); it outsold F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, Hemingway's In Our Time, and other notable books.

The book was translated into 13 languages, including Russian and Chinese. Critics in socialist countries interpreted the work to be an anti-capitalist polemic. "When the book reached Russia," Loos recalled, "it was embraced by Soviet authorities as evidence of the exploitation of helpless female blondes by predatory magnates of the capitalistic system. The Russians, with their native love of grief, stripped Gentlemen Prefer Blondes of all its fun and the plot which they uncovered was dire."

The 1927 sequel, But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes, tells the further adventures of Lorelei Lee, the bubbly blonde narrator of the first book, and her pal, Dorothy Shaw. Several decades later, Loos was asked during a television interview in London whether she intended to write a third book. She facetiously replied that the title and theme of a third book would be Gentlemen Prefer Gentlemen. This remark resulted in the interview's abrupt termination.