A Hundred Years Ago: Living and Writing as an American Expatriate in Paris

As we’re about to celebrate the 100th anniversary of such major works as Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926), to cite only these two, this event will be an opportunity to discuss the reasons that made France and especially Paris so appealing to scores of young American writers and artists in the aftermath of World War I. Far from being the first ones among their fellow citizens to experiment voluntary exile in Paris, the expatriate American writers of the twenties actually belonged to a long tradition of exiles, even though their motivations were different from their predecessors’. Whether it was to fight in the war, to flee the Prohibition, to look for an eluding past, or to take advantage of very profitable change rate, all these writers proved Gertrude Stein’s point: Modern writers needed to have two countries, because their creativity relied and depended on the detachment and deracination that only a foreign place could grant them. From Benjamin Franklin to Langston Hughes and Sylvia Beach, among other prominent figures, our two speakers will evoke the lives and works of exiles whose works were profoundly marked by their experience of exile in France, and which in turn became the foundations of a national, American literature.

Host or Publisher La Maison Française of NYU