Books & Other Writings

In Addition

Amanda has co-authored, edited, or contributed to a number of books on arts and culture, including…

A Farewell to Arms

Written by Ernest Hemingway, with an introduction by Amanda Vaill (Vintage, 2025).

Possibly Hemingway’s finest novel, with a new introduction that turns received ideas about its inspiration and creation inside out.

Jerome Robbins, by Himself: Selections from His Letters, Journals, Drawings, Photographs, and an Unfinished Memoir

Edited and with commentary by Amanda Vaill (Knopf, 2019).

Eight decades of documents and artwork arranged in a chronological but impressionistic narrative that is as close to an autobiography as we will ever get from this titanic choreographer, director and theatrical visionary.

Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy

Edited by Deborah Rothschild (University of California Press, 2007).

The catalog of the critically-acclaimed museum show featuring the art and artifacts of the Murphys and their circle — including Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Picasso, Fernand Léger, Man Ray, and others — with essays by leading scholars in the field.

Seaman Schepps: A Century of New York Jewelry Design

By Amanda Vaill and Janet Zapata (Vendome Press, 2004).

A lavishly designed and illustrated study of the work of a pioneer of American jewelry design whose pieces were collected by cognoscenti from Wallis, Duchess of Windsor, to Andy Warhol.

Journalism

Amanda has written for Air Mail, Allure, Architectural Digest, Art & Auction, ArtNews, artsmeme, Ballet Review, Chicago Tribune Books, Esquire, GQ, Harper’s Bazaar, Introspective, Lincoln Center Theater Review, Mirabella, More, New York Magazine, New York Observer, New York Times Book Review, Newsday, Octavian Review, Porter, Quest, Talk, The Washington Post, Town & Country, and Travel & Leisure.

Some highlights:

“Five Best: Stories of Sisters” - The Wall Street Journal, November 14, 2025
Amanda shares the sisterly stories that have inspired her, from Jane Austen to Tennessee Williams.
“This sacred place holds our national memory. Don’t politicize it.” - The Washington Post, Opinion Section, June 23, 2025
An attack on the Library of Congress, America’s memory palace, is an assault on our national sense of self.
“Of Course It Kills Them” - Air Mail, January 4, 2025
The sacrificial secret hiding in plain sight in Ernest Hemingway’s great novel of love, war, and loss, A Farewell to Arms.
“Elizabeth Taylor Portrayed Through Her Home” - Introspective Magazine, November 2015
Photographer Catharine Opie, celebrated for her studies of leather dykes, teenage basketball players, and freeways, creates a series of surreal, elegiac still lives of the screen goddess’s Bel-Air mansion.
“Rare Bird” - Architectural Digest, June 2011
If the Collyer Brothers moved in with Madame de Pompadour, the result might look like fashion icon Iris Apfel’s exuberantly decorated nest.
“West Side Glory: Lincoln Center at Fifty” - Town & Country, June 2009
How the nation’s leading arts complex survived hype, scorn, and friction to re-create itself with a $1.2 billion renovation.
“Brooklyn Bohemians” - New York Times Book Review, February 6, 2005
The irresistible allure of strange bedfellows: W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and — drum roll, please — Gypsy Rose Lee share a run-down house in Brooklyn Heights during WWII.
“The Only Dame in Town” - New York Magazine, February 21, 1994
How the petite and self-created Paige Rense became the 2000-pound gorilla of interior design.