Why did so many American writers flock to Paris between the two World Wars? What were their social, intellectual, and everyday lives like there?

This work discusses the lived experiences in Paris of great American writers: three Nobel prizewinners (Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, and T.S. Eliot) and others well-known in their own day (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin). These artists wished to escape their materialistic, intolerant, puritanical, and segregationist--in short, stifling and close-minded--homeland. In Paris, they found the freedom to think and to act differently. Their explorations of a city bursting with history, with its promenades, museums, theater, readings, and opportunities for encounters provided countless sources of inspiration that gave rise to such new movements as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Cubism.