Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (novel) also distributed in reprints to newspapers circa 1929 to early 1930s. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (novel) Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: The Intimate Diary of a Professional Lady is a comic novel written by Anita Loos, first published in 1925. It is one of several famous novels published that year to chronicle the so-called Jazz Age, including Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" and Van Vechten's "Firecrackers". Loos was inspired to write the book after watching a sexy blonde turn intellectual H. L. Mencken into a lovestruck schoolboy. Mencken, a close friend, actually enjoyed the work and saw to it that it was published. Originally
Anita Loos a devoted admirer of H. L. Mencken and when he was in New York, she would take a break from her "Tuesday Widows" and join his circle, which included Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Joseph Hergesheimer, essayist Ernest Boyd and theater critic George Jean Nathan. Loos adored Mencken with what may have been love and preferred this group over the Round Table. She gradually realized Emerson paled in comparison to someone like Mencken, and disappointingly, high-IQ gentlemen didn't fall for women with brains, but those with more "downstairs". In 1925, on the train to Hollywood for another Talmadge picture,