A century ago, says Michelle Stacey in Air Mail, a slender novel “captivated casual readers and literary giants alike”, with its careful skewering of Jazz Age consumerism and the lust for class, wealth, sex, social acceptance and, above all, a piece of the American Dream. No, not The Great Gatsby, but Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which was published at almost the exact same time and for years “completely crushed” F Scott Fitzgerald’s classic. Edith Wharton declared it “the great American novel (at last)”; James Joyce told a friend he “couldn’t put it down”. Aldous Huxley wrote to its author that he was “enraptured” by it; William Faulkner offered his “envious congratulations”. The Prince of Wales (later to abdicate as Edward VIII) bought 19 copies.

Today, most people only remember the 1953 film, in which Marilyn Monroe plays the “gold-digging naïf” Lorelei Lee on a madcap tour of Europe, funded by her much older “gentleman friend”. But when the book was first published in the summer of 1925 as a serial in Harper’s Bazaar, “it doubled, then tripled, the magazine’s circulation”. Released as a single volume that November, it sold out in a day (“the second printing of 60,000 was quickly snapped up as well”), and it was the second-highest-selling novel of 1926. Gatsby, meanwhile, had been remaindered by late 1925. The secret may have been that while Fitzgerald’s lens on the Roaring Twenties was tragedy, Loos’s was comedy. And although today Fitzgerald’s work enjoys “near-universal acknowledgment of its purely American genius”, Loos had the last laugh. Fitzgerald died an alcoholic aged 44, his masterpiece (temporarily) forgotten. Loos died in 1981, aged 93, after the “long, glitzy, highly entertaining life” Fitzgerald ached for.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is available to buy here.

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THE LITERARY HOUSE Rydal Mount, a 16th-century, seven-bedroom home in the Lake District’s Ambleside, is where William Wordsworth lived for most of his life, says The Times. On the ground floor is a large open-plan living area with an original fireplace, a separate dining room, a snug, a small library and the kitchen. On the first floor are the bedrooms, along with a large office, three bathrooms and a second kitchen. A further bedroom and the poet’s former study are on the second floor. The property sits on five acres of grounds, which feature a summer house and a tearoom. Windermere is a 15-minute drive. £2.5m.

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