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| Our Hearts Were Young and Gay: An Unforgettable Comic Chronicle of Innocents Abroad in the 1920s
| | Cornelia Otis Skinner
| None of Cornelia Otis Skinner's many accomplishments as actress or author came close to matching the phenomenal popularity of Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, which appeared in 1942 and went through more than twenty printingsa total of more than two million copies. A collaboration with her former Bryn Mawr classmate Emily Kimbrough, the memoir charminglyand quite comicallydetails the pair's youthful trip abroad two decades earlier, when they were almost out of their teens and on their own for the first time. From its very beginning, the flavor of the work is deliciously evident, as Emily surprises a naked man in his hotel room before the girls have even embarked. From Montreal to London to Paris, episode follows upon episode, absurdity upon absurdity: shipwreck in the Saint Lawrence River, an astonishingly funny game of deck tennis, Emily hitting a drowning man with a deck chair, Cornelia breaking out with the measles, both girls oblivious to the ill repute of the house in Dieppe where they found lodging one nightwith sightseeing and romantic yearnings coming in between.
This nostalgic and innocent book is a marvelous voyage, so bright with life and comedy and an air of happy coincidence that it's very hard to put down, and nearly impossible to forget.
Born into a theatrical family, Cornelia Otis Skinner won acclaim as a dramatist and stage actress, a monologuist, a comic essayist (That's Me All Over), and a serious biographer (Madame Sarah). Her friend Emily Kimbrough pursued a successful career as a magazine editor; to know her, Skinner wrote, was "to enhance one's days with gaiety, charm and occasional terror."
"A joyous chronicle from beginning to end. . . . With the actor's sixth sense for comedy [Skinner] knows how to light up a scene and point up a phrase."
Books
"The season's most joyous reading."
Dorothy Hillyer, Boston Globe
"Gay youth and travel in the Twenties make an unbeatable subject for the Cornelia Otis Skinner brand of humor."
New York Times
"The book could have been written only by a couple of ladies whose cardiac youth and gaiety are as unimpaired as ever."
Clifton Fadiman, The New Yorker
"The book is compact of little nothings, made electric by the irresistible delight of youth in life and adventure. We defy anyone to read it without laughter or recall it without a smile."
Saturday Review of Literature
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