The Dud Avocado

By Elaine Dundy
Introduction by Terry Teachout

With a new afterword by the author

The Dud Avocado follows the romantic and comedic adventures of a young American who heads overseas to conquer Paris in the late 1950s. Edith Wharton and Henry James wrote about the American girl abroad, but it was Elaine Dundy's Sally Jay Gorce who told us what she was really thinking. Charming, sexy, and hilarious, The Dud Avocado gained instant cult status when it was first published and it remains a timeless portrait of a woman hell-bent on living.

View the reading group guide (PDF)

Reviews

The Dud Avocado opens with our beautiful and hapless heroine—imagine the panache of Holly Golightly crossed with the naive knowingness of Holden Caulfield—wandering one September morning through Paris in an evening dress.
— Boston Globe

Now, this favorite has been re-issued yet again, with a gorgeous black and white nude on the cover. Fair enough, for here is a book primarily about sex and style...few writers ever soared so high and so delightfully.
— Los Angeles Times

The Dud Avocado follows a charming, if blundering, 21-year-old Missouri native, Sally Jay Gorce, who spends two postcollege years sipping Pernod on "la plus belle avenue du monde," the Champs-Elysees; staging William Saroyan and Tennessee Williams with an American theater troupe, and fumbling terribly at love.
— The New York Sun

Before Bridget Jones, deeply sweet and recklessly intimate Sally Jay Gorce trolled for love (Parisian style) in novelist (and sometime wife of theater critic Kenneth Tynan) Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado, a madcap read from 1958 that's finally back in print in the United States.
— O, The Oprah Magazine

[The Dud Avocado] is one of the best novels about growing up fast.
— The Guardian

I had to tell someone how much I enjoyed The Dud Avocado. It made me laugh, scream, and guffaw (which, incidentally, is a great name for a law firm).
— Groucho Marx

One of the funniest books I've ever read; it should be subtitled 'Daisy Miller's Revenge.'
— Gore Vidal

Also see:

Parisian Life Collection The Dud Avocado, Memoirs of Montparnasse, Pages from the Goncourt Journals, and Witch Grass

The Old Man and Me By Elaine Dundy In Elaine Dundy's follow-up to her best-selling The Dud Avocado, a young American named Honey Flood arrives in London with the goal of seducing its brightest literary star. "A witty black comedy of errors."—Gore Vidal

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