"There was a shine to life wherever they were", said Archibald MacLeish describing his friends Gerald and Sara Murphy. The real-life models for Nicole and Dick Diver in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night, the Murphys have appeared in virtually every book about the Lost Generation, for their apartment in Paris and their Mediterranean Villa America were the center of social and artistic life for the likes of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Stravinsky, John Dos Passos, Jean Cocteau, Cole Porter, and others. Gerald Murphy, the organizer of magical parties, was a brilliant painter whose work is currently undergoing a serious revival. Sara Murphy, an heiress who wore her pearls to the beach, was an enigmatic beauty whose allure enthralled Picasso (he painted her many times) as well as Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

They seemed to live an enchanted life, until 1929 when tragedy struck them in what Gerald called "our most vulnerable spot, our children". The story of their struggle to hold their charmed circle together through the dark years of the thirties and forties is as moving as the account of their creative lives is sparkling.

Everybody Was So Young is both a portrait of two extraordinary people and a biography of a glamorous era that can never be recaptured.