The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris - A Review

On my living room wall there is a mahogany-framed print of French Impressionist painter Jean Béraud's "The Boulevards, Evening In Front of Café Napolitain," a visual masterpiece that reminds me every day how much I love La Ville-Lumière (The City of Light) - Paris, France.

Café Napolitain, located in Paris' Latin Quarter, was frequented by notorious and prominent expatriates of varying global locales like writer/critic Gertrude Stein, painter Pablo Picasso, poet Ezra Pound, painter Salvador Dalí and the infamous Ernest Hemingway (who later wrote about Napolitain in his 1926 novel “The Sun Also Rises”).

And as anyone reading this who has ever "experienced" Paris will tell you, it is indeed a city of enchantment, of history and creativity that has inspired generations of writers and artists alike. And in one deft stroke of a volume, eminent historian David McCullough brings to life the stories of young Americans in Paris between the years 1830 and 1900 in his luminous “The Greater Journey: Americans In Paris.”

Well-known American figures such as writer James Fenimore Cooper, poet Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. and painter Mary Cassat are amongst a cast of many who arrived in Paris with little or no money, and even less knowledge of Paris itself. But they were all rich with grand ambition, each escaping their American boredom to head across the dangerous Atlantic on a Parisian wanderlust quest for adventure and ideas.

As someone who loves Paris as much as I do, I found McCullough's hefty book a marvel of infinite interest and inspiration — much like the spell the city itself held on so many budding young artists well over a century ago.