16Jun

The Lost Generation in the spotlight in Paris

Posted by: afriendinparis Categories: Movies-Videos-Books Non classé
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David McCullough - The Greater Journey (Americans in Paris)

The Lost Generation in the spotlight…

(More details and photos about the books, below)

 

The LOST GENERATION

Literally, the Lost Generation is a group of Americans writers born between 1883 and 1900 and  disillusioned by World War I. They were displeased with social values, sexual and aesthetic conventions and established morality. They were all pioneered new ways of writing, rebelling against the traditional Victorian literary style. 

PARIS –  American writers of the Lost Generation first fled to cities such as Chicago and San Francisco, then to Paris, London, Madrid, Barcelona and Rome. But Paris was the prime city in which the “bohemian” Lost Generation chose to wander. Between 1921 and 1924, the number of Americans in Paris, grew from 6,000 to 30,000.

Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein

GERTRUDE STEIN and THE LOST GENERATION :  The phrase was created by Gertrude Stein (spoken to Hemingway): “You are all a lost generation.”.The Lost Generation included writers such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos and T.S. Eliot.  

Hemingway and Fitzgerald

Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald

It included several painters as well such as Waldo Peirce. ( reference : https://mstalreja.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/ppt-the-lost-generation.pdf) 

MONTPARNASSE – Montparnasse was the gathering place of the Lost Generation. There were many cheap studios, apartments, and it was also an area filled with important cafes (Le Dôme, La Closerie des Lilas, La Rotonde and Le Select to name a few).  “Poverty is a luxury when living in Montparnasse. (Jean Cocteau)

THE LOST GENERATION IN MY BOOKSHOP

Here are the books, in the bookshop where I use to go (see the shop window above and below too) . They are all in French. But I’ve posted the English versions of these books too. Found on Amazon.fr

  • 41xVQWriQyL._SX363_BO1,204,203,200_Kiki de Montparnasse : Catel et José-Louis Bocquet (a comic – 2011)  In English as well :  Kiki de Montparnasse  In the bohemian and brilliant
    Montparnasse of the 1920s, Kiki managed to escape poverty to become one of the most charismatic figures of the avant-garde years between the wars. Partner to Man Ray – whose most legendary photos she inspired – she would be immortalised by Kisling, Foujita, Per Krohg, Calder, Utrillo and Leger. Kiki is the muse of a generation that seeks to escape the hangover of the Great War, but she is above all one of the first emancipated women of the 20th century.©Amazon

  • Ezra Pound (American poet) : Les Cantos In English : The cantos of Ezra Pound‘s 800 page Cantos, written over a period of more than fifty years (1917–1969), invites the reader to join the poet on a journey from darkness and despair towards light and positive activity. In this book, George Kearns addresses the reader approaching The Cantos for the first time. He examines the poem’s aesthetic and political-ethical-didactic dimensions and shows that despite its complexity and the many objections which can be raised to its poetics and politics, its study can be greatly rewarding.”©Amazon

  • Gertrude Stein : Autobiography d’Alice B. Tokias – In English :  The Autobiography of Alice B. Tokias The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was written in 1933 by Gertrude Stein in the guise of an autobiography authored by Alice B. Toklas, who was her lover. It is a fascinating insight into the art scene in Paris as the couple were friends with Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. They begin the war years in England but return to France, volunteering for the American Fund for the French Wounded, driving around France, helping the wounded and homeless. After the war Gertrude has an argument with T. S. Eliot after he finds one of her writings inappropriate. They become friends with Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway. It was written to make money and was indeed a commercial success. However, it attracted criticism, especially from those who appeared in the book and didn’t like the way they were depicted.©Amazon

 

  • James Joyce : Ulysses – In English : Ulysses – Ulysses is a novel by Irish writer James Joyce. It was first serialised in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach in February 1922, in Paris. It is considered to be one of the most important works of Modernist literature, and has been called “a demonstration and summation of the entire movement”. Ulysses chronicles the peripatetic appointments and encounters of Leopold Bloom in Dublin in the course of an ordinary day, 16 June 1904.©Amazon

 

  • Zelda Fitgerald : Accordez moi cette valse – In English : Save me the Waltz
    One of the great literary curios of the twentieth century Save Me the Waltz is the first and only novel by the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald. During the years when Fitzgerald was working on Tender is the Night, Zelda Fitzgerald was preparing her own story, which strangely parallels the narrative of her husband, throwing a fascinating light on Scott Fitzgerald’s life and work. In its own right, it is a vivid and moving story: the confessional of a famous glamour girl of the affluent 1920s and an aspiring ballerina which captures the spirit of an era.©Amazon

  • Jim Fergus : Souvenir de l’amour Chrysis  – In English : The Memory of Love : The new novel by the author of the international bestseller, ONE THOUSAND WHITE WOMEN. After recovering from grave wounds suffered in The Great War, Bogey Lambert, a young cowboy from Colorado, makes his way to 1920s Paris, where he encounters the beautiful painter, Chrysis Jungbluth. Precocious, passionate, talented, the free-spirited Chrysis rebels against a society and an art world in which men have all the privilege and women none. By day, a serious student at the prestigious l’École des Beaux-Arts, at night Chrysis loses herself to the sensual pleasures of the Montparnasse nightlife, where all seems permissible. There, she and the American cowboy will live the love of a lifetime.©Amazon

  • Montparnasse : les lieux de légende – Olivier Renault – Not found in English on Amazon

  • Francis Scott Fitzgerald : Beaux et damnés – In English : The beautiful and damned Anthony Patch and Gloria Gibson are the golden children of the Jazz Age. They marry and embark on a life of glittering parties, lavish expenditure and scandalous revelry. When the money dries up their marriage founders. In this wistful novel Fitzgerald portrays the decline of youthful promise with devastating clarity.©Amazon.fr

 

 

  • Francis Scott Fitzgerald : Tendre est la nuit – In English :  Tender is the night  Set on the French Riviera in the late 1920s, Tender Is the Night is the tragic romance of the young actress Rosemary Hoyt and the stylish American couple Dick and Nicole Diver. A brilliant young psychiatrist at the time of his marriage, Dick is both husband and doctor to Nicole, whose wealth goads him into a lifestyle not his own, and whose growing strength highlights Dick’s harrowing demise.©Amazon.fr

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  • F. Scott Fitzgerald : Gatsby le Magnifique /// In English : The Great Gatsby – The story focuses on the young and mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and his obsession for the enigmatic and beautiful former debutante Daisy Buchanan. Following a colourful cast of characters who live in the fictional town of West Egg on prosperous Long Island in the summer of 1922. This is a classic that has been loved by many for generations.©Amazon.fr
  • D’Ernest Hemingway à Henry Miller : Mythes et réalités des écrivains américains à Paris (1919 – 1939) – de Daniel Gallagher – Not found in English on Amazon.fr

  • Hemingway : Paris est une fête – Nouvelles complètes /// In English : A Moveable feast – Published posthumously in 1964, A Moveable Feast remains one of Ernest Hemingway’s most beloved works…Featuring a personal foreword by Patrick Hemingway, Ernest’s sole surviving son, and an introduction by the editor and grandson of the author, Seán Hemingway, this new edition also includes a number of unfinished, never-before-published Paris sketches revealing experiences that Hemingway had with his son Jack and his first wife, Hadley. Also included are irreverent portraits of other luminaries, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ford Madox Ford, and insightful recollections of his own early experiments with his craft. The restored edition of A Moveable Feast brilliantly evokes the exuberant mood of Paris after World War I and the unbridled creativity and enthusiasm that Hemingway himself experienced. ©Amazon.fr

  • Hemingway : Le Jardin d’Eden  – Hemingway ///  In English  The Garden of Eden is the last uncompleted novel of Ernest Hemingway, which he worked on intermittently from 1946 until his death in 1961. Set on the Côte d’Azur in the 1920s, it is the story of a young American writer, David Bourne, his glamorous wife, Catherine, and the dangerous, erotic game they play when they fall in love with the same woman.©Amazon

  • John Dos Passos : L’initiation d’un homme : 1917 /// In English : John Dos Passos : One Man’s Initiation – 1917 – “One Man’s Initiation:1917” was the first novel of the American writer John Dos Passos (1896 — 1970) and offers a semi-autobiographical account of the writer’s experience as an ambulance driver in France as a young man.©Amazon.fr

  • 41UCj7i0VjL._SX321_BO1,204,203,200_John Dos Passos : Lettres à germaine Lucas Championnière – Written in French by John Dos Passos – Not found in English. 
  • Miller – Grandeur nature – Brassai /// In English : Henry Miller, The Paris Years – This book is a must-read for Henry Miller devotees who want to understand the genesis of this great writer. Written by his close friend Brassai a fascinating story is told about Miller’s down and out days in Paris during the 1930’s and how his vision of writing developed. It is replete with personal anecdotes about Miller’s views of Paris, his hatred (ambivalent as it was) of his homeland and his relations with the women in his life. It more than anything shows Miller as the writer refusing to sell-out by having the essence of his writing edited away by the censorius literary status quo of his day. (Review read on ©Amazon.fr)

  • Henry Miller Printemps noir /// In English : Black Spring : Written during the same period as “Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn”, and banned in the English-speaking world upon its publication in Paris in 1936, “Black Spring” is one of Miller’s finest achievements, and arguably his most distinguished book from a stylistic point of view. It consists of a number of linked episodes describing some of the crucial years in his personal saga, from recollections of his childhood in Brooklyn to his time in Paris.Imbued with the spirit of Miller’s life experience, “Black Spring” is a linguistic tour de force which brings together the American author’s greatest merits.©Amazon.fr

  • Henry Miller Jours tranquilles à Clichy /// In English : Quiet days in Clichy : ‘Here, even if I had a thousand dollar in my pocket, I know of no sight which could arouse in me the feeling of ecstasy’Looking back to Henry Miller’s bohemian life in 1930s Paris, when he was an obscure, penniless writer, Quiet Days in Clichy is a love letter to a city. As he describes nocturnal wanderings through shabby Montmartre streets, cafés and bars, sexual liaisons and volatile love affairs, Miller brilliantly evokes a period that would shape his entire life and oeuvre. . ‘His writing is flamboyant, torrential, chaotic, treacherous, and dangerous’ Anaïs Nin ©Amazon.fr

  • Henry Miller : Tropique du Cancer – Tropique du Capricorne // in English : Tropic of Cancer  ...Henry Miller’s first novel Tropic of Cancer …Set in Paris in the 1930s, it features a starving American writer who lives a bohemian life among prostitutes, pimps, and artists. Banned in the US and the UK for more than thirty years because it was considered pornographic, Tropic of Cancer continued to be distributed in France and smuggled into other countries. When it was first published in the US in 1961, it led to more than 60 obscenity trials until a historic ruling by the Supreme Court defined it as a work of literature. … – Tropic of Capricorn – A cult modern classic, Tropic of Capricorn is … a story of sexual and spiritual awakening, Tropic of Capricorn shocked readers when it was published in 1939. A mixture of fiction and autobiography …Tropic of Capricorn paints a dazzling picture of the life of the writer and of New York City between the wars. Henry Miller is widely recognised as an irreverent, risk-taking writer who redefined the novel and made the link between the European avant-garde and the American Beat generation.©Amazon.fr

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  • William Faulkner : Pylône. In English : Pylon : Pylon, first published in 1935, takes place at an air show in a thinly disguised New Orleans named New Valois. An unnamed reporter for a local newspaper tries to understand a very modern ménage a trois of flyers on the brainstorming circuit.©Amazon.fr
  • William Faulkner : Le Bruit et la fureur. In English : The sound and the fury : Ever since the first furore was created on its publication in 1929, The Sound and the Furyhas been considered one of the key novels of this century. Depicting the gradual disintegration of the Compson family through four fractured narratives, The Sound and the Fury explores intense, passionate family relationships where there is no love, only self-centredness. At its heart this is a novel about lovelessness. ©Amazon.fr
  • 51DtbCRRugL._SX404_BO1,204,203,200_La génération perdue des américains à Paris 1917 – 1939 – Vincent Bouvet has written a few books translated into English on the Roaring Twenties. This book has just been published and apparently hasn’t been translated in English yet. The title in English should be : “The Lost Generation of the Americans in Paris – 1917-1939”

 

  • 41IkUIVVrQL._SX334_BO1,204,203,200_Anaïs Nin : Journal de l’amour et Henry et June  /// In English : Henry and June: From “A Journal of Love” – The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (1931-1932) – 
    Anais Nin (1903-1977) was a French-born author of Catalan, Cuban and Danish descent. She became famous for her erotica, as well as for her published diaries, which span more than sixty years, beginning when she was eleven years old and ending shortly before her death. This bestseller covers a single momentous year during Nin’s life in Paris, when she met Henry Miller and his wife, June. “Closer to what many sexually adventuresome women experience than almost anything I’ve ever read….I found it a very erotic book and profoundly liberating” (Alice Walker). ©Amazon.fr

  • David McCullough : Le Voyage à Paris Les Américains à l’école de la France /// In English :  The greater Journey – Americans in Paris – The bestseller that tells the remarkable story of the generations of American artists, writers, and doctors who traveled to Paris, the intellectual, scientific, and artistic capital of the western world, fell in love with the city and its people, and changed America through what they learned, told by America’s master historian, David McCullough.©Amazon.fr

  • Adrienne Monnier – “Les Gazettes”  and “Rue de l’Odéon” /// Not found in English version on ©Amazon.fr

  • 41tV7bLbjiL._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_Sinclair Lewis – Babbit, first published in 1922, is a novel by Sinclair Lewis. Largely a satire of American culture, society, and behavior, it critiques the vacuity of middle-class American life and its pressure toward conformity. An immediate and controversial bestseller, Babbitt was influential in the decision to award Lewis the Nobel Prize in literature in 1930. The word “Babbitt” entered the English language as a “person and especially a business or professional man who conforms unthinkingly to prevailing middle-class standards”.©Amazon.fr
  • 51AF62PJG1L._SX283_BO1,204,203,200_Laure Murat : Passage de l’Odéon(not found in English on Amazon)
  • Susan Sontag : Le Faucon Pelerin  Susan Sontag was born in Manhattan in 1933 and studied at the universities of Chicago, Harvard and Oxford. She is the author of four novels, a collection of stories, several plays, and six books of essays, among them Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. Her books are translated into thirty-two languages. In 2001 she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work, and in 2003 she received the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. She died in December 2004. (not found in English on Amazon)

51TDR5QY9AL._SX315_BO1,204,203,200_Des Américains à Paris – René Maurice – Not found in English on Amazon.fr

  • 31AVA-UtX-L._SX263_BO1,204,203,200_Gilles Leroy : Alabama song (Goncourt Prize in 2007) Not found in English on ©Amazon.fr

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Your Private Walk with Ann Jeanne in Paris :

in Montparnasse, the gathering neighborhood of the Lost Generation, 

You’d like to feel like a local and having a tour in a Paris neighborhood, but you don’t feel having a tour with a group ?

  • You’d like to discover Paris off the beaten path ?
  • You’d like to see Paris in another perspective and to know more about Paris lifestyle ?

WELCOME !

CONTACT me for a private walking tour and EXPERIENCE PARIS as a local

  • You only, or you and the person you choose.
  • Duration of the tour : from 2 hours.  It includes a coffee in an authentic cafe 
  • The tour can be customized according to your preferences and interests 

For more details :  The tours  and Practical details and fees 

Don’t hesitate to contact me

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… A few days later: the BEAT GENERATION in another bookshop located in the Latin Quarter : 

About the Beat Generation

About the Beat Generation

 

 

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