The Other Americans in Paris
Businessmen, Countesses, Wayward Youth, 1880-1941
352 pages
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14 halftones, 11 line drawings
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6 x 9
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© 2014
While Gertrude Stein hosted the literati of the Left Bank, Mrs. Bates-Batcheller, American socialite and concert singer in Paris, held sumptuous receptions for the Daughters of the American Revolution in her suburban villa. History may remember the artists, writers and musicians of the Left Bank best, but the reality is that there were many more American businessmen, socialites, manufacturers’ representatives, and lawyers, mostly living on the other side of the River Seine.
Nancy L. Green recounts the experiences of a long forgotten part of the American expatriate population in The Other Americans in Paris. She introduces us for the first time to the Right Bank American transplants. There were newly minted American countesses married to foreigners with impressive titles, American women married to American businessmen, and many discharged American soldiers who had settled in France after World War I with their French wives. This book details the politics of citizenship, work and business, and the wealth (and poverty) among the Americans who staked their claim to the City of Light.
Nancy L. Green recounts the experiences of a long forgotten part of the American expatriate population in The Other Americans in Paris. She introduces us for the first time to the Right Bank American transplants. There were newly minted American countesses married to foreigners with impressive titles, American women married to American businessmen, and many discharged American soldiers who had settled in France after World War I with their French wives. This book details the politics of citizenship, work and business, and the wealth (and poverty) among the Americans who staked their claim to the City of Light.
Edward Berenson | New York University
“A fascinating, compelling, and sometimes hilarious look at the Americans of the Right Bank: those who lived across the river from the Lost Generation and belonged to a world apart. Who knew that 90% of the Interwar Americans in Paris rarely visited Shakespeare's and never heard of Gertrude Stein? Nancy Green's wonderful book tells the untold story of the American businessmen, lawyers, renters, heiresses, and slackers who created the "American colony" in Paris and never thought of writing the Great American Novel.”
Donna Gabaccia | University of Minnesota
“Historians of international migration are undoubtedly familiar with the literary Americans living in Paris in the 1920s but only rarely have they incorporated such migrants into their scholarly field of study. With The Other Americans in Paris, Nancy Green gives migration historians ample reason to re-visit and to re-think both Paris (as a unique host society) and Americans as emigrants and immigrants. Green appreciates and documents the individual idiosyncrasies of American businessmen, soldiers, wayward countesses, ‘expats,’ and working-class wanderers, even while making mobility, community organization, and transcultural contacts and misunderstandings—bread and butter issues for migration historians—central themes in her very readable account of Paris’s American ‘colony.’”
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