SOURCE: "Two Enterprising Ladies," in American Mercury, Vol. XIII, No. 52, April, 1928, pp. 506-08.

In the following review, Mencken excoriates Duncan's autobiography, her dancing, and her lifestyle.

[My Life] I assume, was planned as the first of two volumes. It stops short with the fair (and, by that time, somewhat fat) author's invasion of Russia in 1921. That invasion turned out to be as ill-starred as Napoleon's, and she was presently back in France, where she was to die in 1927. What she has to say in her first volume about her curiously banal love affairs has made the book a roaring success, and it is now being read by all the flappers who devoured The President's Daughter six months ago. But what gives it solid interest is not this pathetic and almost mannish mulling over cold amours, but the author's laborious and vain effort to explain the principles of her...