Hotel Florida (Vaill) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1948-49
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Radcliffe College (now Harvard University)
• Currently—lives in New York, New York

Amanda Vaill is an American writer and editor, noted for her non-fiction. A graduate of Radcliffe College (now Harvard University), she worked in publishing before becoming a writer full-time in 1992. In the 1970s Vaill was an editor at Viking Press alongside Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. She lives in New York City.

Writing
In 1995 Vaill published Everybody Was So Young, a biography of Gerald and Sara Murphy, prominent 1920s socialites of the French Rivera. It was nominated for the 1995 National Book Critics Circle Award in biography. She also contributed to the catalogue for Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy, an exhibition mounted by the Williams College Museum of Art, and also shown at the Yale Art Gallery and the Dallas Museum of Art.

Her next book in 2006 was Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins, for which she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She later wrote Something to Dance About, a 2009 PBS documentary about Robbins life and work, which was part of PBS's American Masters series. Her screenwriting was nominated for the 2009 Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for Nonfiction Programming. The film went on to win both an Emmy and a George Foster Peabody Award.

In 2008 Vaill co-wrote a book on her grandfather, the jeweller Seaman Schepps.

Her 2014 book, Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War, follows a group of writers and photographers (including Hemmingway) who covered the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War.

Vaill has also written for Esquire, New York Observer, Talk, Harper’s Bazaar, Architectural Digest, among others. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/34/2014.)