Americans in Paris

by Adam Gopnik (Editor)

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 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 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.



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...

Genres: France, Nonfiction, Travel, Essays, Anthologies, Literature, American

650 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Adam Gopnik is an American writer and essayist, renowned for his extensive contributions to The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1986. Born in Philadelphia and raised in Montreal, he earned a BA in art history from McGill University and pursued graduate work at the NYU Institute of Fine Arts. Gopnik began his career as the magazine’s art critic before becoming its Paris correspondent in 1995. His dispatches from France were later collected in Paris to the Moon (2000), a bestseller that marked his emergence as a major voice in literary nonfiction.
He is the author of numerous books exploring topics from parenting and urban life to liberalism and food culture, including Through the Children's Gate, The Table Comes First, Angels and Ages, A Thousand Small Sanities, and The Real Work. Gopnik’s children’s fiction includes The King in the Window and The Steps Across the Water. He also delivered the 50th Massey Lectures in 2011, which became the basis for Winter: Five Windows on the Season.
Since 2015, Gopnik has expanded into musical theatre, writing lyrics and libretti for works such as The Most Beautiful Room in New York and the oratorio Sentences. He is a frequent media commentator, with appearances on BBC Radio 4 and Charlie Rose, and has received several National Magazine Awards and a George Polk Award. Gopnik lives in New York with his wife and their two children. He remains an influential cultural commentator known for his wit, insight, and elegant prose.

Reviews

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved Adam Gopnik's Paris to the Moon so when I heard about his latest - a compilation of esssays - I was delighted. It's not a book I read cover to cover, just pick it up for a read now and then. I do enjoy it.

[Stacy Jensen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was such a great book. It's a compilation of stories, essays, diary entries, book excerpts and even a little poetry from famous and not so famous Americans who lived or traveled through one of the most beautiful cities in the world. I especially loved some of the accounts from Benjamin Franklin. And those excesses of the roaring twenties are seriously Sodom and Gomorrah. The World War II pieces were riviting! A wonderful way of seeing Paris through the eyes of many a different personality.

[Elizabeth Guider · Rating 5 out of 5]

All the different ways in which Americans have experienced -- and thus shaped how we imagine-- PARIS. For anyone interested in how our perceptions and prejudices and predilections for things European, and indeed for things American, have changed since Benjamin Franklin set the template, dip into and out of this smartly selected anthology. Lotsa interesting people weighed in on Paris, from Franklin and Jefferson and Abigail Adams to P.T. Barnum. Gopnik's opening preface is perceptive as well.

[Krisette Spangler · Rating 4 out of 5]

There were some wonderful essays in this compilation. I loved the ones that took me back to the sights, sounds, and especially, the tastes of Paris. This essays cover a lot of the history of Paris as well. It's worth reading if you love Paris.

[Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a great book - best writing is from Edith Wharton.

[Brooke Everett · Rating 3 out of 5]

Full disclosure: I did not read every page or piece in this anthology. Please see below!

1/16/23-2/5/23 
Read up to page 106 
Intro, Benjamin Franklin (1767) - Harriet Beecher Stowe (1854)

This is a meaty anthology, spanning 3 centuries, clocking in at 608 pages, and weighing 2 full pounds.  It indisputably fits my definition of bench presses for the brain, and is dedicated to one of my favorite topics: Paris.

"An American in Paris is, as they say, a story in itself: one need merely posit it to have the idea of a narrative spring up, even if there is no narrative to tell."  p. xiii

Written by a wide swath of Americans who have spent significant time in Paris, this collection provides a vivid glimpse into history.  Their distinct voices cover a huge range of topics: manners and social life, politics and Royal activities, art and culture (including fashion), and Parisian habits like spending time in the city's beautiful parks with their small dogs.

While I do find all of this information very important to my personal knowledge base of Paris, quite a bit of the old timey writing style isn't particularly engaging.  I'd read 3 pages, have to go back and re-read it, and then fall asleep.  That doesn't make me love it less, but it's challenging to tackle a big chunk of this book in one reading session.  For this reason, I plan to pick it up and read a few chapters between books / when I'm waiting for something to arrive from my library hold queue.

Abigail Adams, Letters from Auteuil, To Mrs. Warren, 5 September 1784: "I believe this nation is the only one in the world which could make pleasure the business of life and yet retain such a relish for it as never to complain of its being tasteless or insipid; the Parisians seem to have exhausted nature and art in this science, and to be 'triste' is a complaint of a most serious nature."  p. 10

From the headnotes on Thomas Jefferson: "Where Franklin was the model American backwoods philosopher and (mostly theoretical) libertine, Jefferson was the model student, the first on a Junior Year Abroad.  He bought the wine, admired the architecture (which he later copied), and befriended the intellectuals, including La Fayette and La Rochefoucauld."  p. 14

James Gallatin, from The Diary of James Gallatin, 11 August 1816: "I have but little work to do here.  I foresee I will soon be in mischief.  Paris is indeed the paradise of young men."  p. 34

From the headnotes on James Fenimore Cooper: "Fiercely judgmental and perhaps a tad too easily shocked, he nonetheless had a sharp eye for French manners - and emerges as one of the first Americans to look genuinely hard at Paris while remaining resolutely unimpressed by it."  p. 69

James Fenimore Cooper, from Gleanings in Europe, 1837: "The approach to a Paris lodging is usually either very good, or very bad.  In the new buildings may be found some of the mediocrity of the new order of things; but in all those which were erected previously to the revolution, there is nothing but extremes in this, as in most other things.  Great luxury and elegance, or great meanness and discomfort."  p. 71

Harriet Beecher Stowe, from Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands, 1854, on her visit to the Louvre: "I should compare Rubens to Shakspeare [sic], for the wonderful variety and vital force of his artistic power.  I know no other mind he so nearly resembles.  Like Shakspeare, he forces you to accept and to forgive a thousand excesses, and uses his own faults as musicians use discords, only to enhance the perfection of harmony.  There certainly is some use even in defects.  A faultless style sends you to sleep.  Defects rouse and excite the sensibility to seek and appreciate excellence.  Some of Shakspeare's finest passages explode all grammar and rhetoric like skyrockets - the thought blows the language to shivers."  p. 100

4/10/23-4/11/23
Read pages 107-120
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1858) - Mark Twain (1869)

I only read 2 pieces as a palate cleanser between fiction books.  In the intro to Mark Twain's piece, The Innocents Abroad, Gopnik describes Twain using a euphemism: "the American as disappointed libertine and failed student," then further asserting that, "[Twain] invents the tradition of American disappointment."  I thought Twain sounded downright rude and haughty, and it turned me off so much I ran into the arms of another piece of fiction that I'm confident I'll actually like.  Will return to this tome later as another non-fiction palate cleanser.

4/2/25-4/4/25
Cherry picked / read the following pieces:
F. Scott Fitzgerald - Babylon Revisited
James Baldwin - Equal in Paris
Jack Kerouac - from Satori in Paris
M.F.K. Fisher - Gare de Lyon
Diana Vreeland - from D.V.

My to-read stack is brimming with exciting new fiction, and once again I used this as a non-fiction palate cleanser.  Looking back on my thoughts from the previous pieces I read (and keeping in mind that it took me almost exactly 2 years to pick this book back up), I cherry picked and read only the pieces that interested me.  My primary takeaway this time was that I simply must get on the Baldwin train asap.  His account of being arrested in Paris for a stolen bedsheet (seriously), the ensuing ordeal, and the authority figures encountered along the way was vividly harrowing and surely a similar scenario is happening somewhere in the world on this very day.

From the headnotes on Baldwin: "In Paris, Baldwin discovered that the American racism he fled was simply a subset of a larger and inevitable human indifference to suffering."  p. 467

Baldwin: "The moment I began living in French hotels I understood the necessity of French cafés.  This made it rather difficult to look me up, for as soon as I was out of bed I hopefully took notebook and fountain pen off to the upstairs room of the Flore, where I consumed rather a lot of coffee and, as evening approached, rather a lot of alcohol, but did not get much writing done."  p. 468

"None poured as much emotional energy into the fact of their arrest as I did; they took it, as I would have liked to take it, as simply another unlucky happening in a very dirty world.  For, though I had grown accustomed to thinking of myself as looking upon the world with a hard, penetrating eye, the truth was that they were far more realistic about the world than I, and more nearly right about it."  p. 476

"Any society inevitably produces its criminals, but a society at once rigid and unstable can do nothing whatever to alleviate the poverty of its lowest members, cannot present to the hypothetical young man at the crucial moment that so-well-advertised right path.  And the fact, perhaps, that the French are the earth's least sentimental people and must also be numbered among the most proud aggravates the plight of their lowest, youngest, and unluckiest members, for it means that the idea of rehabilitation is scarcely real to them.  I confess that this attitude on their part raises in me sentiments of exasperation, admiration, and despair, revealing as it does, in both the best and the worst sense, their renowned and spectacular hard-headedness."  p. 479

"I was dulled by their merriment, even though it was meant to warm me.  It could only remind me of the laughter I had often heard at home, laughter which I had sometimes deliberately elicited.  This laughter is the laughter of those who consider themselves to be at a safe remove from all the wretched, for whom the pain of living is not real.  I had heard it so often in my native land that I had resolved to find a place where I would never hear it any more.  In some deep, black, stony, and liberating way, my life, in my own eyes, began during that first year in Paris, when it was borne in on me that this laughter is universal and can never be stilled."  p. 481

In the headnotes on Kerouac: "...reminding us that one of the things that Americans have in common with the French, and share not at all with the suspicious English, is a readiness to like things."  p. 577

Vreeland: "A woman dressed by Chanel back in the twenties and thirties - like a woman dressed by Balenciaga in the fifties and sixties - walked into a room and had a dignity, an authority, a thing beyond a question of taste."  p. 598

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a rule, I dislike anthologies. They remind me of reading only tiny chunks of great works for survey classes--as if you could fancy yourself well-read by reading only one act of every Shakespeare play. The emphasis on breadth instead of depth--vexing.

However--they are good for introducing a broad range of writers, and this one pushed me off my normal reading path. I was convinced to buy it because I knew that Gopnik is an engaged reader and that he would select good pieces. And so he has.

As a reference for myself, since it's too heavy to carry home and I must abandon it here, I particularly liked the pieces by:

James Gallatin
Nathaniel Parker Willis
George Catlin (and his tally of women walking with one small dog, two small dogs, three small dogs, or one large dog no string)
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Mark Twain, that rogue
The grumpy Henry Adams
Sherwood Anderson
Anita Loos
William Faulkner
Janet Flanner, astute, intelligent, clear
Elizabeth Bishop
Dawn Powell ("I cannot get anyone to admit that rue Jacob is a continuation of rue de l'Universite or Boulevard des Italiens is a continuation of Boulevard des Capucines. No. These streets have nothing to do with each other. No, Madame, it is not the same street under a different name, it is an entirely different street...")
James Baldwin
SJ Perelman
May Sarton
Paul Zweig

[Keith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent selection of literature written by Americans in Paris, for either a short while, or most of their lives, starting with Benjamin Franklin, and going by way of those such as Paine, Longfellow, Emerson, Beecher Stowe, Hawthorne, Twain, Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Miller, Thurber, Kerouac and numerous other lesser-known writer, as well and those not known for their writing, like P.T. Barnum. A rich variety of styles and perspectives. Well worth the read, even for those who have never visited or lived in Paris, but probably much more interesting and enlightening for those of us who’ve had the chance to live here.

[Avis Black · Rating 3 out of 5]

The selections are rather uneven in quality, but overall this a solid piece of reading. The most interesting entries are from the 1700 and 1800s.

[Suzie · Rating 4 out of 5]

just reread this one! still love it and just as fun I remember. I always love an anthology. so insightful and full of important reflection.

[Deedee]

Dewey 810.8032 A

[Kristin Fouquet · Rating 5 out of 5]

This absorbing compilation of essays spans three centuries of Americans visiting La Ville Lumière. I found the varied perspectives fascinating, but one constant was obvious- Paris transforms her guests.

[Ted · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Gopnik's introduction and enjoyed the bulk of these excerpts. This is a book to own, however, not to check out from the library as I did, so you can flip through it over time. Read one after the other, it felt a bit repetitive.

[Sierra Withers · Rating 2 out of 5]

Was for school. Not my cup of tea.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

My one problem with this book is that there were rarely translations of the French phrases used. I looked some of them up, but most of the time I guessed.

[Lindsey Sparks · Rating 4 out of 5]

This brings to gather a wide variety of essays and excerpts from Americans from all eras and walks of life. From Thomas Jefferson to Gertrude Stein, it seems like every semi-famous American who has visited Paris is represented. In any collection you're going to have some outstanding entries and some that you just skim but overall this was solid.