Summary: "This is the inspiring and, until now, untold story of the adventurous American artists, writers, doctors, politicians, architects, and others of high aspiration who set off for Paris in the years between 1830 and 1900, ambitious to excel in their work. Most had never left home, never experienced a different culture. None had any guarantee of success. That they achieved so much for themselves and their country profoundly altered American history. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female doctor in America; future abolitionist Charles Sumner; staunch friends James Fenimore Cooper and Samuel F. B. Morse (who saw something in France that gave him the idea for the telegraph); pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk; medical student Oliver Wendell Holmes; writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, and Henry James; Harriet Beecher Stowe, seeking escape from the notoriety Uncle Tom's Cabin had brought her; sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens and painters Mary Cassatt and John Singer Sargent; and American ambassador Elihu Washburne, who bravely remained at his post through the Franco-Prussian War, the long Siege of Paris and even more atrocious nightmare of the Commune. His vivid account in his diary of the starvation and suffering endured by the people of Paris (drawn on here for the first time) is one readers will never forget. Nearly all of these Americans, whatever their troubles, spent many of the happiest days and nights of their lives in Paris."--From publisher description.
Library Journal Reviews
Using a cache of letters, journals, and memoirs McCullough explores the impact of Paris on American thought and creativity during the 19th century. Tracing the city's influence on dozens of characters, McCullough offers readers his special blend of accessible, story-based social history. His lists of subjects reads like the top class of a 19th-century who's who: Augustus Saint-Gaudens (the New York sculptor), Mary Cassatt, Oliver Wendell Holmes (father of the Supreme Court Justice), James Fenimore Cooper, Samuel F.B. Morse, Charles Sumner (who went on to be the key voice in the Senate against slavery), and Harriet Beecher Stowe all make appearances. As McCullough's wonderful book makes clear, these luminaries did not just sharpen and deepen their particular expertise in Paris, they witnessed and absorbed a way of life and outlook that was both totally foreign and extremely influential. Presenting an intersecting grid of tales, McCullough dips out of one story only to dip into another as he explores the individual biographies that collectively make his point. The result is narrative nonfiction at its best, a work that seduces the reader with a fascinating blend of strongly defined characters, illuminating and intriguing detail, and an engrossing pace. - Neal Wyatt, "RA Crossroads", Booksmack! 7/7/11 Read-alikes: (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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