Selected Bibliography
The second section, “Selected Literary and Cultural Criticism,” includes interpretations and analyses of Blondes and critical interpretations of Loos’s professional career that may illuminate the novel further. This section begins with the earliest known scholarly article on the novel by T. E. Blom (1976), followed by Susan Hegeman’s (1995) reappraisal of the novel, which seems to have been a milestone in unlocking Blondes as a focus of more regular scholarly analyses. The section then focuses primarily on analyses of Blondes that bring unique cultural contexts to bear on the novel, as well as reevaluations of Loos’s career. In a reversal of fortunes, while Hegeman’s recovery of Loos’s novel was framed as a correction against the relatively robust existing scholarship on the film version of the novel and Loos’s presence in film studies, the most recent article on the list, by Katherine Fusco (2024), analyzes Loos’s career through the lens of her writing about film as a correction to readings of Loos’s career through the lens of the novel.
Selected Biographical and Historical Sources
Bailey, Glenda, and Elizabeth Hummer, eds. Harper’s Bazaar 150 Years: The Greatest Moments. Abrams, 2017.Bernays, Edward L. Biography of an Idea: Memoirs of Public Relations Counsel. Simon and Schuster, 1965.
Carey, Gary. Anita Loos: A Biography. 1st ed. Knopf, 1988.
Dardis, Tom. Firebrand: The Life of Horace Liveright. 1st ed. Random House, 1995.
Egleston, Charles, ed. The House of Boni & Liveright, 1917—1933: A Documentary Volume. Dictionary of Literary Biography 288. Gale, 2004.
Endres, Kathleen L., and Therese L. Lueck. Women’s Periodicals in the United States: Consumer Magazines. Historical Guides to the World’s Periodicals and Newspapers. Greenwood Press, 1995.
Exman, Eugene. The House of Harper: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Publishing. 1st ed. Harper & Row, 1967.
Gilmer, Walker. Horace Liveright, Publisher of the Twenties. D. Lewis, 1970.
Kellner, Bruce. The Last Dandy, Ralph Barton: American Artist, 1891—1931. Missouri Biography Series. University of Missouri Press, 1991.
Le Galliard, Marianne, Éric Pujalet-Plaà, Glenda Bailey, Olivier Gabet, Lisa Davidson, Sally Laruelle, and Musée des arts décoratifs. Harper’s Bazaar: First in Fashion. Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 2020.
Leckie, Janet T. A Talent for Living: The Story of Henry Sell, an American Original. Hawthorn Books, 1970.
Loos, Anita. “The Biography of a Book.” In “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”: The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady. Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1963. [New introduction to 1963 edition.]
———. A Cast of Thousands. Grosset & Dunlap, 1977.
———. A Girl Like I. Viking Press, 1966.
———. Kiss Hollywood Good-By. Ballantine Books, 1975.
———. The Talmadge Girls: A Memoir. Viking Press, 1978.
Snow, Carmel White. The World of Carmel Snow. 1st ed. McGraw-Hill, 1962.
Tye, Larry. The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays & the Birth of Public Relations. 1st ed. Crown Publishers, 1998.
Selected Literary and Cultural Criticism
Blom, T. E. “Anita Loos and Sexual Economics: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue Canadienne d’Etudes Américaines 7 (1976): 39–47. https://doi.org/10.3138/CRAS-007-01-04.Churchwell, Sarah. “‘Lost among the Ads’: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and the Politics of Imitation.” In Middlebrow Moderns: Popular American Women Writers of the 1920s, edited by Lisa Botshon, Meredith Goldsmith, and Joan Shelley Rubin. Northeastern University Press, 2003.
Evans, Anne-Marie. “Fashionable Females: Women, Clothes, and Culture in New York.” Comparative American Studies: An International Journal 11, no. 4 (December 2013): 361–73. https://doi.org/10.1179/1477570013Z.00000000054.
Frost, Laura. “Blondes Have More Fun: Anita Loos and the Language of Silent Cinema.” Modernism/Modernity 17, no. 2 (April 2010): 291–311. https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.0.0213.
Fusco, Katherine. “Better Travel through Brand Names: The Couture Grand Tour in Paris Is a Woman’s Town and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 62, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2016.0005.
———. “Neither Typist nor Genius: Hollywood as Workplace in the John Emerson and Anita Loos How-to Guides.” Feminist Modernist Studies 7, no. 1 (2024): 31–49. https://doi.org/10.1080/24692921.2023.2293628.
Hammill, Faye. “‘Brains Are Really Everything’: Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” In Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture between the Wars. Literary Modernism Series. University of Texas Press, 2007.
Hefner, Brooks E. “‘Any Chance to Be Unrefined’: Film Narrative Modes in Anita Loos’ Fiction.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 125, no. 1 (January 2010): 107. https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2010.125.1.107.
Hegeman, Susan. “Taking Blondes Seriously.” American Literary History 7, no. 3 (Fall 1995): 535–54. https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/7.3.525.
Kroik, Polina. “‘A Girl Can’t Go on Laughing All the Time’: Anita Loos and the Hollywood Studio System.” In Cultural Production and the Politics of Women’s Work in American Literature and Film. Routledge, 2019.
Luczak, Ewa Barbara. “Is the ‘Strenuous Life’ a Pleasant Life? Euthenic Efficiency, Racial Duty, and the Phenomenon of Anita Loos.” In Mocking Eugenics: American Culture against Scientific Hatred. Routledge, 2021.
Mendelman, Lisa. “Sentimental Satire in Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” In The Sentimental Mode: Essays in Literature, Film and Television, edited by Jennifer A. Williamson, Jennifer Larson, and Ashley Reed. McFarland & Company, Inc., 2014.
Shoplik, Anthony. “Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and the ‘Colyumn’: Sophistication, Publicity, and Jazz Journalism.” Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 13, no. 2 (2022): 276–98. https://doi.org/10.5325/jmodeperistud.13.2.0276.
Tracy, Daniel. “From Vernacular Humor to Middlebrow Modernism: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and the Creation of Literary Value.” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 66, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 115–43. https://doi.org/10.1353/arq.0.0059.
Wood, Bethany. “Gentlemen Prefer Adaptations: Addressing Industry and Gender in Adaptation Studies.” Theatre Journal 66, no. 4 (December 2014): 559–79. https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2014.0120.