New Readings of American Expats in Paris

More than fifty years after his violent death in 1961, Ernest Hemingway remains a writer of gigantic proportions. He has a faithful following among high school and university readers, bolstered by a popular culture industry of Hollywood adaptations, biopics, documentaries, and fictionalized expat films: most recently, Hemingway and Gellhorn (2012), an action-packed film starring Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman; Woody Allen’s summer blockbuster comedy Midnight in Paris (2011); Greta Schiller’s documentary Paris Was A Woman (1996); and Alan Rudolph’s The Moderns (1988). What could three new expat books—two of them volumes of largely unpublished letters by Hemingway and by Sylvia Beach, along with a new fictional portrait of Hemingway’s first marriage to Hadley Richardson—possibly add to this rich reputation? In a word, plenty, as newly published sources become available, and as the women contributors to Modernism move from the sidelines into the limelight, claiming their own experiences and reconfiguring American identity in post-war Paris. The combined insights of these three books are manifold and will resonate for years to come

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Comedy · Hollywood · Identity (music · Limelight · Literature · Media studies · Modernism (music · Newspaper · Performance art · Portrait · Sociology · American and British Literature Analysis · History