''Our Hearts Were Young and Gay'' is a book by actress

Cornelia Otis Skinner Cornelia Otis Skinner (May 30, 1899 – July 9, 1979) was an American writer and actress. Biography Skinner was the only child of actor Otis Skinner and actress Maud Durbin. After attending the all-girls' Baldwin School and Bryn Mawr College ( ...

and journalist

Emily Kimbrough Emily Kimbrough (October 23, 1899 – February 10, 1989) was an American author and journalist. Biography Emily Kimbrough was born in Muncie, Indiana. In 1921 she graduated from Bryn Mawr College and went on a trip to Europe with her friend Co ...

, published in 1942. The book presents a description of their European tour in the 1920s, when they were fresh out of college from Bryn Mawr. Skinner wrote of Kimbrough, "To know Emily is to enhance one's days with gaiety, charm and occasional terror". The book was popular with readers, spending five weeks atop the ''New York Times'' Non-Fiction Best Seller list in the winter of 1943. The book was made into a motion picture in 1944, and in 1946 it was dramatized as a 3-act comedy play by

Jean Kerr Jean Kerr (born Bridget Jean Collins, July 10, 1922 – January 5, 2003) was an Irish-American author and playwright born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, who authored the 1957 bestseller ''Please Don't Eat the Daisies'' and the plays ''King of Hea ...

. In 1950 the book served as the basis for a

CBS CBS Broadcasting Inc., commonly shortened to CBS, the abbreviation of its former legal name Columbia Broadcasting System, is an American commercial broadcast television and radio network serving as the flagship property of the CBS Entertainmen ...

television comedy series. The series initially had the same name as the book, but after two weeks it was retitled '' The Girls''. In 1960 a 2-act

musical comedy Musical theatre is a form of theatrical performance that combines songs, spoken dialogue, acting and dance. The story and emotional content of a musical – humor, pathos, love, anger – are communicated through words, music, movemen ...

version of the book was created. During the

Second World War World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

Hugh Trevor-Roper Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, Baron Dacre of Glanton (15 January 1914 – 26 January 2003) was an English historian. He was Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford. Trevor-Roper was a polemicist and essayist on a range of ...

discovered that this book was used as a

codebook A codebook is a type of document used for gathering and storing cryptography codes. Originally codebooks were often literally , but today codebook is a byword for the complete record of a series of codes, regardless of physical format. Cryptog ...

by German intelligence.Glenn P. Hastedt, editor,
Spies, Wiretaps and Secret Operations: A Encyclopedia of American Intelligence
', Santa Barbara, ABC-CLIO 2011, p. 253

References

External links

*{{IMDb title, id=0037158, title=Our Hearts Were Young and Gay 1942 non-fiction books 1920s in Europe Dodd, Mead & Co. books Non-fiction books adapted into films