Paris works its enchantment on American men and women of letters

Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology

Edited by Adam Gopnik

Library of America: 614 pp., $40

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April in Paris. May in Paris, November in Paris and why not January and February to boot? Every month, indeed it sometimes seems that every day, has been celebrated as best spent in Paris. No other city in the world has this allure, this romance, this reputation that a person's life is incomplete without having been there at least once. Adam Gopnik has compiled a superb anthology focused on the American experience of Paris.

Gopnik, a writer for the New Yorker and author of the bestselling "Paris to the Moon," organizes "Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology" chronologically, beginning with Benjamin Franklin's observations of his first visit in 1767, long before there was a United States. "The Civilities we every where receive give us the strongest Impressions of the French Politeness." Franklin writes that six days in Paris have changed him more than six years at home. Of his transformation by a French tailor and wigmaker, he says: "Only think what a Figure I make in a little Bag Wig and Naked Ears!"

Franklin and others included in the anthology have been changed by Paris and, as a result, they seem a little more alive to the full range of human feeling, as evidenced in the wistful memoirs of Dorothy Tanning, whose marriage to Max Ernst put her at the center of the French avant-garde. "Try, try to remember at least some of the thirty-four times three hundred and sixty-five nights. They are the ones to be cherished," she writes. "Try, try to remember them and the same number of days to match, all shine and midnight blue, before they turn to black."

The cast of 69 writers is unequaled by any other anthology about Paris. Hemingway, still the unmatched romantic, edges against Frederick Douglass; Art Buchwald is there alongside P.T. Barnum, and Charles Lindberg after landing in Paris at the end of his historic flight. Gertrude Stein presides over the city where James Baldwin, like so many both before and after, discovers that he is really an American after all, writing, "In some deep, black, stony, and liberating way, my life, in my own eyes, began during that first year in Paris...."