Amanda Vaill is a writer and critic whose articles have appeared in the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and magazines such as Esquire and GQ. Vaill's first book, published in 1998, was a biography of an American couple who were part of the Paris "Lost Generation" in the 1920s. In Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy, A Lost Generation Love Story, Vaill focuses mainly on those years in France, when the Murphys were at the center of a artistic circle that included Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. (Fitzgerald used the Murphys as models for the characters Nicole and Dick Driver in Tender is the Night.) Amanda Vaill lives in New York.… Before becoming a full-time writer, she was an executive editor at the Viking Penguin publishing house.