Book of the week: The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris by David McCullough

Among the cast in David McCullough's history of Americans in 19th century Paris are James Fenimore Cooper, Henry James, John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, Samuel Morse, and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

(Simon & Schuster, $37.50)

Oh, to be a young American in 19th-century Paris! said Stacy Schiff in The New York Times. Turning back the clock to a time long before backpacks and Eurail passes, before Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, historian David McCullough has created a portrait of the time that reads like “a book of spells.” In the 1830s, when his story begins, there were probably fewer than 1,000 Americans in Paris, and just about all of them shared a sense of pilgrimage, and of enchantment. The wine cost almost nothing, and the Parisians were unfailingly polite: At the Louvre, U.S. citizenship opened the doors during the five days each week that the museum was officially closed. A good thing, too, since Yankee expats of that generation were earnest students. Most who’d been drawn to Paris were there to study art or medicine, not the nightlife.

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