Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford

Title: Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford
Author: Jessica Mitford
ISBN: 9780375410321
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2006
Binding: Hardcover
Language: English
Edition: First Edition
Number of Pages: 768
Condition Note: Excellent, unmarked copy with little wear and tight binding. We ship in recyclable American-made mailers. 100% money-back guarantee on all orders.
C: 1697733
Section: Biography & Autobiography | Memoirs
Publisher Description: "Decca" Mitford lived a larger-than-life life: born into the British aristocracy--one of the famous (and sometimes infamous) Mitford sisters--she ran away to Spain during the Spanish Civil War with her cousin Esmond Romilly, Winston Churchill's nephew, then came to America, became a tireless political activist and a member of the Communist Party, and embarked on a brilliant career as a memoirist and muckraking journalist (her funeral-industry exposé, The American Way of Death, became an instant classic). She was a celebrated wit, a charmer, and throughout her life a prolific and passionate writer of letters--now gathered here.

Decca's correspondence crackles with irreverent humor and mischief, and with acute insight into human behavior (and misbehavior) that attests to her generous experience of the worlds of politics, the arts, journalism, publishing, and high and low society. Here is correspondence with everyone from Katharine Graham and George Jackson, Betty Friedan, Miss Manners, Julie Andrews, Maya Angelou, Harry Truman, and Hillary Rodham Clinton to Decca's sisters the Duchess of Devonshire and the novelist Nancy Mitford, her parents, her husbands, her children, and her grandchildren.

In a profile of J.K. Rowling, The Daily Telegraph (UK), said, "Her favorite drink is gin and tonic, her least favorite food, trip. Her heroine is Jessica Mitford."