The Bright Young People have largely passed into an object of myth, but there is very little critical scrutiny of their literary representations. In this article I examine Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, Anthony Powell’s Afternoon Men, and Henry Green’s Party Going for points of contact and similarity. I situate these works among a larger class of Mayfair novels from the time period, establishing as well the literary networks in which the works were published and circulated. I then examine the three novels for their depictions of social class, the status of language and dialect as a separating social force, and the ways in which they struggled to provide realist literary depictions when pitted against emerging technologies like the cinema.