Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology

From the earliest years of the American republic, Paris has provoked an extraordinary American literary response. An almost inevitable destination for writers and thinkers, Paris has been many things to many Americans: a tradition-bound bastion of the old world of Europe; a hotbed of revolutionary ideologies in politics and art; and a space in which to cultivate an openness to life and love thought impossible at home. Including stories, letters, memoirs, and reporting, Americans in Paris distills three centuries of vigorous, glittering, and powerfully emotional writing about the place that Henry James called "the most brilliant city in the world."

American writers came to Paris as statesmen, soldiers, students, tourists, and sometimes they stayed as expatriates. This anthology ranges from the crucial early impressions of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin to the latter-day reflections of writers as varied as James Baldwin, Isadora Duncan, and Jack Kerouac. Along the way we encounter the energetic travelers of the 19th century — Emerson, Mark Twain, Henry James — and the pilgrims of the 20th: Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E. E. Cummings, Cole Porter, Henry Miller. Come along as Thomas Paine takes a direct and dangerous part in the French Revolution; Harriet Beecher Stowe tours the Louvre; Theodore Dreiser samples the sensual enticements of Parisian night life; Edith Wharton movingly describes Paris in the early days of World War I; John Dos Passos charts the gathering political storms of the 1930s; Paul Zweig recalls the intertwined pleasures of language and sex; and A. J. Liebling savors the memory of his culinary education in delicious detail.

Americans in Paris is a diverse and constantly engaging mosaic, full of revealing cultural gulfs and misunderstandings, personal and literary experimentation, and profound moments of self-discovery.

"Although Americans in Paris has a chronological structure, Mr. Gopnik still gives it a soupçon of suspense: the reader moves from section to section wondering whether the book can top what it has just delivered." New York Times

"[T]his delightful literary anthology will compel readers to keep coming back to experience Paris. Recommended..." Library Journal

"The variety of people represented in the book...and the wide spectrum of their experiences gives Americans in Paris a broad appeal, making it accessible to an audience beyond that of Francophiles and lovers of literature." BookPage

"Gopnik...does a superb and pithy job of introducing the writers and placing them in the context of their time..." San Francisco Chronicle

"A superb anthology focused on the American experience of Paris....The cast of 69 writers is unequaled by any other anthology about Paris....Americans in Paris is more necessary than a toothbrush for anyone's next voyage to the City of Light." Los Angeles Times

Including stories, letters, memoirs, and journalism, Americans in Paris distills three centuries of vigorous, glittering, and powerfully emotional writing about the place that Henry James called "the most brilliant city in the world."

Adam Gopnik is a staff writer at the New Yorker and author of the best-selling Paris to the Moon. He lived in Paris with his family from 1995 to 2000, where he wrote the magazine's "Paris Journal," which led the French newspaper Le Monde to call him a "witty and Voltairean commentator on French life." His writing has won the National Magazine Award for Essays and Criticism and the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting.

Introduction
Benjamin Franklin — Letter to Mary Stevenson
Abigail Adams — Letters from Auteuil
Thomas Jefferson — Two Letters
Gouverneur Morris — from A Diary of the French Revolution
Thomas Paine — Shall Louis XVI. Have Respite?
James Gallatin — from The Diary of James Gallatin
George Ticknor — from Life, Letters, and Journals
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow — Letter to Stephen Longfellow, Jr.
Ralph Waldo Emerson — from Journal, 1833
Nathaniel Parker Willis — from Pencillings by the Way
James Fenimore Cooper — from Gleanings in Europe
P. T. Barnum — from Struggles and Triumphs; or, Forty Years' Recollections
George Catlin — from Catlin's Notes of Eight Years' Travels and Residence in Europe
Margaret Fuller — from Things and Thoughts in Europe
Harriet Beecher Stowe — from Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands
Nathaniel Hawthorne — from The French Notebooks
Mark Twain — from The Innocents Abroad
Elihu Washburne — The Proclamation of the Republic
Henry James — Occasional Paris — "The Velvet Glove"
Frederick Douglass — Letter from Paris
Henry Adams — Letter to John Hay
Richard Harding Davis — from The Show-Places of Paris
Isadora Duncan — from My Life
Edward Steichen — from A Life in Photography
James Weldon Johnson — from Along This Way
Theodore Dreiser — A Traveler at Forty
Edith Wharton — The Look of Paris
Edith Wharton — from A Backward Glance
Randolph Bourne — Mon Amie
Sherwood Anderson — Paris Notebook, 1921
Carl Van Vechten — from Peter Whiffle: His Life and Works
Malcolm Cowley — Significant Gesture
Matthew Josephson — from Life Among the Surrealists
Langston Hughes — from The Big Sea
Anita Loos — from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
William Faulkner — Four Letters from Paris, 1925
e. e. cummings — from Post Impressions — Vive la Folie!
Charles Lindbergh — from The Spirit of St. Louis
Waverly Root — The Flying Fool
Ernest Hemingway — from A Moveable Feast
Hart Crane — Postcard to Samuel Loveman
Harry Crosby — Paris Diaries
Cole Porter — You Don't Know Paree
F. Scott Fitzgerald — Babylon Revisited
Lincoln Kirstein — From an Early Diary
Gertrude Stein — from Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas — from Paris France
Henry Miller — Walking Up and Down in China
John Dos Passos — A Spring Month in Paris
Anne Morrow Lindbergh — from The Flower and the Nettle
Oscar Hammerstein II — The Last Time I Saw Paris
Sylvia Beach — from Shakespeare and Company
Janet Flanner — Letter from Paris
Elizabeth Bishop — Paris, 7 A.M.
Ludwig Bemelmans — No. 13, Rue St. Augustin
Richard Wilbur — Place Pigalle
Dawn Powell — Three Letters
Art Buchwald — from First Days in Paris
James Baldwin — Equal in Paris
Irwin Shaw — from Remembrance of Things Past
S. J. Perelman — The Saucier's Apprentice
May Sarton — Good-by to a World
Paul Zweig — from Departures
James Thurber — The First Time I Saw Paris
Sidney Bechet — Trouble in Paris
A. J. Liebling — from Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris
Virgil Thomson — 17 quai Voltaire
Jack Kerouac — from Satori in Paris
M.F.K. Fisher — Gare de Lyon
Diana Vreeland — from D.V.
Dorothea Tanning — from Birthday
Sources and Acknowledgments