In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • News of Paris: American Journalists in the City of Light Between the Wars
  • Craig Monk
News of Paris: American Journalists in the City of Light Between the Wars. By Ronald Weber. Chicago: Irvin R. Dee, 2006. 352 pp. Illus. Index. $27.50.

The startling revelation behind News of Paris is Ronald Weber's fervent belief that what he describes as the portrait of American life abroad in the 1920s and 1930s requires further study at all. But by examining the careers of American newspaper writers and editors in Paris, he succeeds in making a genuinely important contribution to our knowledge of expatriation between the World Wars. His text largely reminds readers that an often threadbare foreign media in Paris helped sustain a generation of American writers whose earliest creative works had yet to find a readership lucrative enough to support them. Along the way, however, Weber unearths a host of little-known or forgotten characters, expatriates from Al Laney to Paul Mowrer, whose colorful lives abroad actually fed the fictions of their more luminous colleagues. The research materials for much of News of Paris are the autobiographies, many of them also little-known or forgotten, that were written about this period by expatriate newspapermen. Weber, using this untapped [End Page 132] treasury of detail, makes a convincing connection between the newspapers of the era and the literary magazines to which some of their more ambitious writers migrated, but he spends less time than some readers may wish describing the inner workings of the publications themselves. By focusing on the backers of these publications, Weber manages to eschew the printer's ink with which scholars of periodicals sometimes cover themselves in their examinations of the day-to-day operations of different kinds of publications.

News of Paris begins by examining the lot of Jake Barnes, the protagonist of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926). Long before Tyrone Power played him on the silver screen, Barnes had become for readers of American fiction the most famous expatriate in Paris. To judge from his life, however, an American newspaperman abroad spent his days reading French publications and readying himself for the city after dark. Weber includes Barnes primarily to invoke the influence of Hemingway, who himself began life abroad by working as a correspondent for the Toronto Star. Because Weber concerns himself with a host of different titles that published concurrently, a simple chronological narrative will not do. Instead, Hemingway emerges, if not as the center around which the narrative revolves, at least as a shadow cast over the story told, and an important point of departure for much that is said. He contributes occasional pieces to a variety of expatriate publications; he offers his criticism of a number of prominent periodicals; he becomes, along with Henry Miller, the only writer to emerge from the newspapers whose achievement justifies a lasting reputation as a novelist.

Still, the heart of this book is the rivalry between the Paris Herald and the European edition of the Chicago Tribune. Established in 1887, the Herald paid its staff well and found for its pains a teeming, well-heeled readership drawn from the Right Bank. It bore the stamp of J. G. Bennett, its founder, a dandy whose propensity for hiring British eccentrics to work on an American paper defined its contents until the middle of the 1920s. By the end of the First World War, the paper had a circulation of 350,000 but had done little to shed its stuffy reputation. The stereotype of the feisty Tribune, steeped in a latter-day bohemia, may have been overstated, but the paper always concerned itself with the intellectual and cultural life of the expatriate community, uncovered by the scruffy and unwieldy staff it drew from the Left Bank. Born of the army edition of its Midwestern parent, the paper grew after the armistice under the watchful eye of its founder, Robert McCormick. There is good evidence that while he was able to steer the direction of the editorial page from a distance, McCormick had pitifully little knowledge of the overall content of his newspaper. What can be concluded from the story of the Herald...

pdf

Share