Anita Loos

Anita Loos was an American novelist, screenwriter, and playwright, born on April 26, 1888, in Sissons, California, and died on August 18, 1981, in New York City. A child performer who grew up in San Francisco theaters, she sold her first scenario to D.W. Griffith's Biograph Company in 1912 at age twenty-four and went on to write or co-write more than two hundred films across the silent and sound eras.

Her comic novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, serialized in Harper's Bazaar in 1925 and published in book form that same year, became an international sensation. Told as the diary of the gold-digging flapper Lorelei Lee, the book drew admirers including Edith Wharton, who reportedly called it "the great American novel," and James Joyce, who said it was one of the few works he could read without his failing eyesight tiring. It was adapted into a 1928 silent film, a 1949 Broadway musical, and the 1953 Howard Hawks film starring Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell.

Loos collaborated extensively in early Hollywood with figures including Douglas Fairbanks, for whom she wrote witty intertitles, and director John Emerson, whom she married in 1919. She continued screenwriting through the 1940s, working on MGM productions such as The Women (1939) and San Francisco (1936).

Her later memoirs, including A Girl Like I (1966) and Kiss Hollywood Good-by (1974), preserved firsthand accounts of the silent era's pioneers.

The name Anita is a Spanish diminutive of Ana, the Iberian form of Hannah, from the Hebrew ḥannāh meaning "grace" or "favor." The suffix -ita adds a sense of warmth and affection. The name suits her wit and brevity, and she carried it as a woman who turned a one-line joke into a literary brand.