Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes represents a curious case in the literary history of the 1920s. Though a phenomenal best-seller in 1925, its place in subsequent accounts of the literary production of that year is overshadowed by F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time, Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans, TS Eliot's Poems, 1909-1925-and even by other best-sellers such as Bruce Barton's life of Christ-as-salesman, The Man Nobody Knows, and Percival Christopher Wren's Beau Geste (Hart 234-44). 1 At the time of its publication, however, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes garnered the admiration of a remarkable range of literary figures including William Faulkner and Aldous Huxley. James Joyce apparently devoted a precious three days of his failing eyesight to reading it, and Edith Wharton wrote of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes."[I am] now reading the great Ameri-can novel (at last!) and I want to know if there are-or will beothers and if you know the young woman [who wrote it], who must be a genius"(Carey 98, 108; Gentlemen 8; Fate 63-64). Though one could thus say that this critically ignored book possessed a decidedly canonical readership, critics who have ad-dressed its popularity have done so with barely disguised embarrassment. RWB Lewis suggests that Wharton's enthusiasm for" this popular gem" rested on her perception that it represented something of an homage to her own work (468-69). Far more condescendingly, Frederick J. Hoffman, in his comprehensive lit-erary history The Twenties, only once mentions Blondes-a book exemplary of any number of issues relevant to that decade-to suggest that its 1949 incarnation as a stage musical propagated the popular view of the twenties as a" grotesque world, remem-bered for sophomoric behavior and ingenious evasions of serious responsibility"(377).

Indeed, Blondes's critical reputation as a literary work may be marred for some by its fame as the basis of the popular stage musical starring Carol Channing and the 1953 Howard Hawks musical film starring Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell. Ironi-cally, the film has been an important site for feminist scholarship, most significantly as the object of discussion for what Jane