Description
“Paris was where the twentieth century was. Paris was the place to be.” ? Gertrude SteinAmerica’s fascination with Paris began even before we became a nation. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson spent agreeable afternoons in its salons and shops?as well as long hours attending to their diplomatic missions. For them, whether to stay in Paris or return home was not an easy choice. Ever since, thousands of extraordinary Americans have faced a similar dilemma.Stephen Longstreet, himself once a habitu? of the boulevards, bo?tes, and caf?s of Paris, draws on letters, newspapers, journals, and unpublished material to depict the unique charms that have led Americans to work there, play there, and in many cases, stay there. We All Went to Paris is a boisterous chronicle of dozens of famous and infamous Americans?geniuses and poseurs, society women and swindlers?who flocked to Paris and added their own special glow to the City of Light. Here is the dashing inventor Robert Fulton, running his first successful steamboat on the Seine; James McNeill Whistler, who first came to Paris as an art student and later refused to have his masterpiece hang in any other city; F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, who became the very models of the modern expatriate writer; Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, who discovered a home together in Paris that they could not discover anywhere else; Henry Miller and Richard Wright, who found among its streets freedom of expression and escape from prejudice. Henry James, Edith Wharton, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Jack Johnson, Isadora Duncan, Josephine Baker, Cole Porter, and William Faulkner?an A-list of talented Americans made their way there and into this book. Accompanied by his own striking drawings, Longstreet’s narrative also captures the color, glamour, and jittery excitement of Parisian streetlife and nightlife, taking readers to places such as Maxim’s, Bricktop’s, the markets of Les Halles, Shakespeare and Company, and Harry’s New York Bar?all prime stops on the whirlwind tour.And we still go to Paris, looking for the same riches, the same joie de vivre as will be found in this delightful book.
