Americans In Paris
By Neil Dodds
26 July, 2006
Paris between the wars wasn't just a golden era for American fiction: Journalism thrived in the French capital too, with reporters flocking to the city to work as foreign correspondents, cultural critics or as hacks on one of the two big US newspapers based there.
Paris offered a relaxed attitude to sex, the excitement of the post-war boom - and, important this for journalists, it didn't suffer US-style prohibition.
The New York Herald's Paris edition, founded in 1887, attracted "the most colorful, competent and sometimes crazy newspapermen that ever populated a city room," according to its managing editor. Crosstown rival the Paris Herald also earned a reputation for "high jinks." Before the two papers merged to become the rather more conservative International Herald Tribune.
The rest, as they say, is history, but in his new book, Ronald Weber has captured some of the atmosphere of the generation who worked in Paris alongside American literary giants like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein.
News of Paris: American Journalists in the City of Light Between the Wars is published by Ivan R Dee.
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