Montparnasse: Paris's District of Memory and Desire

(Paperback)

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In the third portrait of his series Great Parisian Neighborhoods, award-winning raconteur John Baxter takes readers on a dazzling excursion of Montparnasse.

By the IACP Award-winning author of the national bestseller The Most Beautiful Walk in the World, MONTPARNASSE reveals the history and present delights of the iconic neighborhood that is best associated with the vibrant 1920-30s-era Parisa romantic time and place evoked in Hemingway's memoir A Moveable Feast and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. From the first meeting of Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald to their friendship's bitter conclusion; from the courage of the anti-Nazi resistance to the clubs where German generals partied; from the attempted murder of Samuel Beckett to the rise of Josephine Baker to stardom; from thehigh life of the Coupole and the Cafe du Dme to the bawdy music halls of rue de la Gait; no Paris quarter has witnessed more tumultuous events than Montparnasse.

In a ground-breaking reappraisal of this most glamorous of Paris's districts, Baxter looks beyond the nostalgia to the secret history of Montparnasse, a district where desire effaced memory and every taste could be satisfiedeven those which were unexpressed.If, as Oscar Wilde suggested, all good Americans went to Paris when they died, it was Montparnasse that brought them back to life.

Author Bio

John Baxter is a film critic, novelist, biographer and broadcaster, whose books on the cinema include The Hollywood Exiles, The Cinema of John Ford, and highly praised biographies of Ken Russell, Fellini, Bunuel, Steven Spielberg, Kubrick and Woody Allen. Born in Australia, John Baxter now lives in Paris.