live alone and like it by marjorie hillis

Hillis typified the glamorous, independent Live-Aloner of the Depression era. Hillis shone in her very public role as “the exemplary Live-Aloner, enjoying her privacy and solitude amid the glamour and excitement of New York City”, and this, combined with high-profile readers – the likes of Margaret Fishback, the highest paid female advertising copywriter of the 1930s (she worked at Macy’s department store), poet and general girl about town and the prolific and hugely popular journalist and columnist Dorothy Dix – and great reviews, and innovative department store-based advertising campaigns, all ensured the book’s impressive sales figures. None were quite as popular as the first, which, Scutts tells us, was a 'cultural phenomenon, with a life that reached well beyond its pages'. Live Alone and Like It was the first in a series of seven books, the last of which, published three decades later, was called Keep Going and Like It: A Guide to the Sixties and Onward and Upward. Scutts's book, written with an enticing no-nonsense clarity that is reminiscent of Hillis's original, acts as both a biography of Hillis and paints a fascinating portrait of the cultural context surrounding her work.

As Joanna Scutts explains in her fabulous new book, The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It, Hillis's 'Live-Aloners' are a breed of elegant, resourceful, intelligent women of the kind an earlier generation would have described as possessing gumption in spades. Instead, it's an etiquette guide-meets-self-help book, written with a delightful bounce and absence of self-pity. But the chances are that at some time in your life, possibly only now and then between husbands, you will find yourself settling down to a solitary existence.” “Five out of ten people of the people who do so can’t help themselves, and at least three of the others are irritatingly selfish.

“This book is no brief in favour of living alone,” reads the opening line.

Hillis was in her mid-40s and had spent nearly 30 years working at Vogue – hired as a caption writer back in 1907, she had risen up the ranks to associate editor – and she lived alone in an apartment in the desirable Tudor City complex in Manhattan's Midtown.ĭespite the independence she had secured for herself (she hailed from a comfortable if conservative Brooklyn family, her father was a preacher and her mother a homemaker), Hillis wasn't exactly an ardent feminist, nor was Live Alone and Like It a manifesto advocating solitary living, but rather a practical (albeit it for the relatively privileged) 'how (best) to' guide. Published in July, it raced up the bestseller lists – more than 16,000 copies sold in August, 19,000 in September, and an astonishing 22,366 in October. I n the United States, in 1936, Marjorie Hillis's Live Alone and Like It: The Classic Guide for the Single Woman became an unlikely success.

Live alone and like it by marjorie hillis