Paris is the crowning jewel of France, and this literary guide for
travelers explores its 20th century history, from 1900-1950.
Paris at the turn of the twentieth century had become the cultural
capital of the world. Artists and writers came to contribute to
flourishing avant-garde movements, as the Left Bank became a new center
of creativity. It drew tourists and travelers, but also many exiled from
their home countries or escaping political persecution, and those
seeking freedom from social constraints.
The romantic myth of Paris persists, but Marie-José Gransard explores
the darker side of the City of Lights. She brings her subjects to life
by describing where and how they lived, what they wrote and what was
written about them, through a wide-ranging literary legacy of diaries,
memoirs, letters, poetry, theater, cinema and fiction. In
Twentieth-Century Paris: a Literary Guide for Travellers (1900-1950)
both the visitor and the armchair traveler alike will find familiar
names, from Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell to Virginia Woolf and
Katherine Mansfield, and they will encounter unfairly forgotten or
neglected writers, and many artists and musicians, famous and less
well-known Russians, and writers and thinkers from as far as the
Caribbean and Latin America.
