A mad, amusing, and revealing look at Paris in the twenties and at the people Caresse Crosby knew-Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, James Joyce, Picasso, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Lawrence of Arabia, and a host of others. In a single day, a visitor to the Crosby home outside of Paris might have found Salvador Dali at work in one room, Douglas Fairbanks Senior playfully swinging from the rafters, and D. H. Lawrence sunning himself by the pool. "In her autobiography Mrs. Crosby has added a valuable footnote to the literary history of our time....She tells some amazingly good stories. Her account of Lindbergh's arrival in Paris is a superb piece of straight reporting and her description of a Quatre Arts ball at which she won first prize for reasons that cannot be mentioned in a family newspaper is funny and sad at the same time. Her fostering of unknown or otherwise unpublishable writers (Crane, Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, among others) through the Black Sun Press can now be seen clearly for the important project it was.-The New York Times "The Passionate Years becomes immediately an essential document of its era. Also it is an entertaining book."-New York Herald Tribune