Vaill's research suggested that they were also trying to recreate and improve on their real families ''with people like Scott and Ernest and Dos and Phil Barry and Dotty Parker as substitutes for their relatives who always drove them crazy,'' the author said. The Murphys were not just trying to duplicate East Hampton. ''It was where every few days, or even daily, they could be with their friends in a relaxed, informal way, just as they would do on lazy summer afternoons in East Hampton.'' ''It was another place where Sara and Gerald could swim, sail, picnic and sit or walk the beach with their friends and children,'' Ms.

Vaill suggested that it was really a stand-in for the Murphy family's 30-room mansion in East Hampton called the Dunes, with its lush gardens and dramatic ocean view. Vaill, an editor for Viking turned author, speculated that it was the Murphys' strong attachment to East Hampton that led them, while in Europe in 1924, to buy and begin to renovate a house in Antibes. In a recent interview in her own spacious book-and-memorabilia-crammed apartment in New York, Ms. ''Sara and Gerald were always coming back to it, either in spirit or in the flesh.'' If not for East Hampton's impact on the Murphys' lives, she decided, 20th-century art and literature might not have been the same. ''East Hampton was their touchstone,'' Ms. Vaill recalled, the Murphys' presence and their passion for East Hampton felt all-encompassing. WHILE she was working on her new biography, ''Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy and Their Circle - A Lost Generation Love Story,'' Amanda Vaill kept hearing the sound of the same surf, walking the same beach, studying the same breathtaking view of trees and sky that she realized the Murphys had loved throughout their long lives in East Hampton.Īs she sorted through a jumble of memorabilia that the Murphys' surviving daughter, Honoria Donnelly Murphy, now 80, has stored in her house, ''everything from menus and guest books, to linen-cupboard inventories and old packing lists,'' Ms.

Everybody Was So Young by Amanda Vaill