American Expatriates in Paris in the 1920s (Five College Learning in Retirement)

About this event

Community Room. Dick Stonberg, a 13 year member of the local organization Five College Learning in Retirement, will be giving a presentation entitled American Expatriates in Paris in the 1920s here at the Forbes on Tuesday November 10th at 6 o’clock. His talk will cover an extraordinary period when American writers, some who had fought in World War 1, chose to remain in Paris after the war to write their novels. These authors included Earnest Hemingway, F.Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, John Dos Pasos, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and many more. The first wave of expatriation was what Gertrude Stein called “the lost generation,” which referred to the alienation of the young men and women who had lived through and sometimes witnessed firsthand the devastations of the war. This brought forth the greatest collection of war theme books that the world had ever seen, such as Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Just between 1921 and 1924, the number of Americans in Paris swelled from 6,000 to 30,000. Paris, with its artistic freedom and innovative spirit, exercised a magnetic attraction for several generations of artists, musicians, and intellectuals, large numbers of whom migrated there from all over the world. Many African Americans who had fought in the war decided to stay in more tolerant France rather than return to the racist Jim Crow South where the Ku Klux Klan was on a lynching spree in the 1920s. Parisians fell in love with American Jazz with dances like the Charleston, the Peabody, and the Turkey Trot. The exotic dancer Josephine Baker became an overnight sensation. Composer Cole Porter had many parties at Ada “Bricktop” Smith’s night club. At the conclusion of Dick’s presentation, he will give a brief talk about the benefits of becoming a member of Five College Learning in Retirement and answer questions about this lifelong learning community. In the meantime, feel free to go to their website at https://fclir.org/

Description from forbeslibrary.libcal.com