Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"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
Review
"[T]his delightful literary anthology will compel readers to keep coming back to experience Paris. Recommended..." Library Journal
Review
"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
Review
"Gopnik...does a superb and pithy job of introducing the writers and placing them in the context of their time..." San Francisco Chronicle
Review
"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
Synopsis
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."
About the Author
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.
Table of Contents
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