American Writers in Paris | Ernest Earnest (essay date 1968)
Ernest Earnest (essay date 1968)
SOURCE: “After they've Seen Paree: The Expatriates of the 1920s,” in Expatriates and Patriots: American Artists, Scholars, and Writers in Europe, Duke University Press, 1968, pp. 251-275.
[In the following excerpt, Earnest credits such literary journals as The Little Review and The Dial, as well as the publication of The Education of Henry Adams, with the decision of American writers and artists to emigrate to Europe following World War I.]
Nothing before or since has equaled the mass expatriation of Americans of the 1920s. It has almost the quality of the instinctive migration of the lemmings. As Malcolm Cowley says, “… the younger and footloose intellectuals went streaming up the longest gangplank in the world.” And along with the intellectuals went the playboys, the recent college graduates, the art students, and the hangers on at the fringes of the intellectual...
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