The Making Of Americans In Paris

While living in Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century, expatriate American writers Edith Wharton (1862-1937) and Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) never crossed paths. Even so, they did rub shoulders in print, in autobiographical essays published by The Atlantic Monthly in 1933. Noel Sloboda shows that the authors pursued many of the same professional goals in these essays and in the book-length life writings that grew out of them, A Backward Glance (1934) and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). By analyzing the personal and cultural contexts in which these works were produced, as well as subjects common to both of them, Sloboda illuminates a previously unrecognized solidarity between Wharton and Stein. The relationship between the authors is built upon careful analysis of A Backward Glance and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and it is framed by a consideration of the markets into which their life writings were first released. The alignment of Wharton and Stein as life writers will be of interest to those studying autobiography, modern literature, and American women writers.

Acclaimed journalist Charlie Glass looks to the American expatriate experience of Nazi-occupied Paris to reveal a fascinating forgotten history of the greatest generation. In Americans in Paris, tales of adventure, intrigue, passion, deceit, and survival unfold season by season, from the spring of 1940 to liberation in the summer of 1944, as renowned journalist Charles Glass tells the story of a remarkable cast of expatriates and their struggles in Nazi Paris. Before the Second World War began, approximately thirty thousand Americans lived in Paris, and when war broke out in 1939 almost five thousand remained. As citizens of a neutral nation, the Americans in Paris believed they had little to fear. They were wrong. Glass's discovery of letters, diaries, war documents, and police files reveals as never before how Americans were trapped in a web of intrigue, collaboration, and courage. Artists, writers, scientists, playboys, musicians, cultural mandarins, and ordinary businessmen-all were swept up in extraordinary circumstances and tested as few Americans before or since. Charles Bedaux, a French-born, naturalized American millionaire, determined his alliances as a businessman first, a decision that would ultimately make him an enemy to all. Countess Clara Longworth de Chambrun was torn by family ties to President Roosevelt and the Vichy government, but her fiercest loyalty was to her beloved American Library of Paris. Sylvia Beach attempted to run her famous English-language bookshop, Shakespeare & Company, while helping her Jewish friends and her colleagues in the Resistance. Dr. Sumner Jackson, wartime chief surgeon of the American Hospital in Paris, risked his life aiding Allied soldiers to escape to Britain and resisting the occupier from the first day. These stories and others come together to create a unique portrait of an eccentric, original, diverse American community. Charles Glass has written an exciting, fast-paced, and elegant account of the moral contradictions faced by Americans in Paris during France's dangerous occupation years. For four hard years, from the summer of 1940 until U.S. troops liberated Paris in August 1944, Americans were intimately caught up in the city's fate. Americans in Paris is an unforgettable tale of treachery by some, cowardice by others, and unparalleled bravery by a few.

The #1 bestseller that tells the remarkable story of the generations of American artists, writers, and doctors who traveled to Paris, fell in love with the city and its people, and changed America through what they learned, told by America’s master historian, David McCullough. Not all pioneers went west. In The Greater Journey, David McCullough tells the enthralling, inspiring—and until now, untold—story of the adventurous American artists, writers, doctors, politicians, and others who set off for Paris in the years between 1830 and 1900, hungry to learn and to excel in their work. What they achieved would profoundly alter American history. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female doctor in America, was one of this intrepid band. Another was Charles Sumner, whose encounters with black students at the Sorbonne inspired him to become the most powerful voice for abolition in the US Senate. Friends James Fenimore Cooper and Samuel F. B. Morse worked unrelentingly every day in Paris, Morse not only painting what would be his masterpiece, but also bringing home his momentous idea for the telegraph. Harriet Beecher Stowe traveled to Paris to escape the controversy generated by her book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Three of the greatest American artists ever—sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, painters Mary Cassatt and John Singer Sargent—flourished in Paris, inspired by French masters. Almost forgotten today, the heroic American ambassador Elihu Washburne bravely remained at his post through the Franco-Prussian War, the long Siege of Paris, and the nightmare of the Commune. His vivid diary account of the starvation and suffering endured by the people of Paris is published here for the first time. Telling their stories with power and intimacy, McCullough brings us into the lives of remarkable men and women who, in Saint-Gaudens’ phrase, longed “to soar into the blue.”

Americans often look back on Paris between the world wars as a charming escape from the enduring inequalities and reactionary politics of the United States. In this bold and original study, Brooke Blower shows that nothing could be further from the truth. She reveals the breadth of American activities in the capital, the lessons visitors drew from their stay, and the passionate responses they elicited from others. For many sojourners-not just for the most famous expatriate artists and writers- Paris served as an important crossroads, a place where Americans reimagined their position in the world and grappled with what it meant to be American in the new century, even as they came up against conflicting interpretations of American power by others. Interwar Paris may have been a capital of the arts, notorious for its pleasures, but it was also smoldering with radical and reactionary plots, suffused with noise, filth, and chaos, teeming with immigrants and refugees, communist rioters, fascism admirers, overzealous police, and obnoxious tourists. Sketching Americans' place in this evocative landscape, Blower shows how arrivals were drawn into the capital's battles, both wittingly and unwittingly. Americans in Paris found themselves on the front lines of an emerging culture of political engagements-a transatlantic matrix of causes and connections, which encompassed debates about "Americanization" and "anti-American" protests during the Sacco-Vanzetti affair as well as a host of other international incidents. Blower carefully depicts how these controversies and a backdrop of polarized European politics honed Americans' political stances and sense of national distinctiveness. A model of urban, transnational history, Becoming Americans in Paris offers a nuanced portrait of how Americans helped to shape the cultural politics of interwar Paris, and, at the same time, how Paris helped to shape modern American political culture.

"America is my country but Paris is my home." So spoke Gertrude Stein, summing up for all time the attraction that Paris held for that legendary group of Americans who lived and worked there during the first four decades of the century. From the arrival of Gertrude Stein in 1903 to Henry Miller's departure in 1939, this brilliant group included Virgil Thomson, Man Ray, Ernest Hemingway and E. E. Cummings. In an atmosphere saturated with creation and the classical spirit of France, each member of this extra-ordinary group responded differently to the creative opportunities Paris offered. George Wickes shows the results of these influences through the individual works of literature, art and music produced by these men and women while in Paris. AMERICANS IN PARIS is filled with new detail and observation by an author who himself has tasted the intoxicating atmosphere of the City of Light that so pervades the works of this company of America's most colorful artistic geniuses. Born in Belgium and raised in New York state, George Wickes has often been an American in Paris, and spent considerable time in other parts of the world, including a wartime tour of duty with the O.S.S. in Southeast Asia. He is a contributor to such journals as Shenandoah, The New Republic, and The Paris Review and has produced books dealing with other members of the literary scene, including Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller and Aldous Huxley. Mr. Wickes lives with his family in Southern California where he teaches modern literature at Harvey Mudd College of the Claremont Colleges of Southern California.

Matched only by Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, Paris France is a "fresh and sagacious" (The New Yorker) classic of prewar France and its unforgettable literary eminences. Celebrated for her innovative literary bravura, Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) settled into a bustling Paris at the turn of the twentieth century, never again to return to her native America. While in Paris, she not only surrounded herself with—and tirelessly championed the careers of—a remarkable group of young expatriate artists but also solidified herself as "one of the most controversial figures of American letters" (New York Times). In Paris France (1940)—published here with a new introduction from Adam Gopnik—Stein unites her childhood memories of Paris with her observations about everything from art and war to love and cooking. The result is an unforgettable glimpse into a bygone era, one on the brink of revolutionary change.

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is a book by Gertrude Stein, written in the guise of an autobiography authored by Alice B. Toklas. Alice was an American-born member of the Parisian avant-garde of the early 20th century, and the life partner Gertrude Stein. The book starts with Alice's days in San Francisco, before she moved to France, then describes her moving to Paris, meeting Gertrude, and starting their life together. The book had mixed reception, both among critics and Stein's friends, but the success of it was great. Today it is ranked it as one of the 20 greatest English-language nonfiction books of the 20th century. Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was an American novelist, poet, playwright and art collector, best known for Three Lives, The Making of Americans and Tender Buttons. Stein moved to Paris in 1903, and made France her home for the remainder of her life. Picasso and Cubism were an important influence on Stein's writing. Her works are compared to James Joyce's Ulysses and to Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time.