Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology: A Library of America Special Publication

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 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.? 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 nineteenth century?Emerson, Mark Twain, Henry James?and the pilgrims of the twentieth: 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.

Contents:

Letter to Mary Stevenson by Benjamin Franklin
Letters from Auteuil by Abigail Adams
Two letters by Thomas Jefferson
from A diary of the French Revolution by Gouverneur Morris
Shall Louis XVI. have respite? by Thomas Paine
from The diary of James Gallatin by James Gallatin
from Life, letters, and journals by George Ticknor
Letter to Stephen Longfellow, Jr. by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
from Journal, 1833 by Ralph Waldo Emerson
from Pencillings by the way by Nathaniel Parker Willis
from Gleanings in Europe by James Fenimore Cooper
from Struggles and triumphs; or, Forty years’ recollections by P.T. Barnum
from Catlin’s Notes of eight years’ travels and residence in Europe by George Catlin
from Things and thoughts in Europe by Margaret Fuller
from Sunny memories of foreign lands by Harriet Beecher Stowe
from The French notebooks by Nathaniel Hawthorne
from The innocents abroad by Mark Twain
The proclamation of the republic by Elihu Washburne
Occasional Paris ; “The velvet glove” by Henry James
Letter from Paris by Frederick Douglass
Letter to John Hay by Henry Adams
from The show-places of Paris by Richard Harding Davis. from My life by Isadora Duncan
from A life in photography by Edward Steichen
from Along this way by James Weldon Johnson
A traveler at forty by Theodore Dreiser
The look of Paris ; from A backward glance by Edith Wharton
Mon amie by Randolph Bourne
Paris notebook, 1921 by Sherwood Anderson
from Peter Whiffle by Carl Van Vechten
Significant gesture by Malcolm Cowley
from Life among the surrealists by Matthew Josephson
from The big sea by Langston Hughes
from Gentlemen prefer blondes by Anita Loos
Four letters from Paris, 1925 by William Faulkner
from Post impressions ; Vive la Folie! by E.E. Cummings
from The spirit of St. Louis by Charles Lindbergh
The flying fool by Waverly Root
from A moveable feast by Ernest Hemingway
Postcard to Samuel Loveman by Hart Crane
Paris diaries by Harry Crosby
You don’t know Paree by Cole Porter
Babylon revisited by F. Scott Fitzgerald
From an early diary by Lincoln Kirstein
from The autobiography of Alice B. Toklas ; from Paris France by Gertrude Stein
Walking up and down in China by Henry Miller
A spring month in Paris by John Dos Passos
from The flower and the nettle by Anne Morrow Lindberg. The last time I saw Paris by Oscar Hammerstein II
from Shakespeare and Company by Sylvia Beach
Letter from Paris by Janet Flanner
Paris, 7 A.M. by Elizabeth Bishop
No. 13 Rue St. Augustin by Ludwig Bemelmans
Place Pigalle by Richard Wilbur
Three letters by Dawn Powell
from First days in Paris by Art Buchwald
Equal in Paris by James Baldwin
from Remembrance of things past by Irwin Shaw
The saucier’s apprentice by S.J. Perlman
Good-bye to a world by May Sarton
from Departures by Paul Zweig
The first time I saw Paris by James Thurber
Trouble in Paris by Sidney Bechet
from Between meals : an appetite for Paris by A.J. Liebling
17 Quai Voltaire by Virgil Thomson
from Satori in Paris by Jack Kerouac
Gare de Lyon by M.F.K. Fisher
from D.V. by Diana Vreeland
from Birthday by Dorothea Tanning