Book Review by Terrance Gelenter

The Library of America is renowned for publishing and championing the canons of American literature in beautiful hardcover editions with glossy black covers often with an historical painting of authors such as Willa Cather, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Herman Melville and Richard Wright to name but a few.

"Americans in Paris" is a worthy addition to the collection showcasing the works of Americans in Paris from the first true expatriate, Benjamin Franklin and his contemporaries Jefferson, Paine and Adams (Abigail), to the Lost Generation of Les Années Folles, Fitzgerald, Flanner and Hemingway and the black writers of the fifties, Baldwin and Wright.

But happily you'll also find the neglected, the unfamiliar, like The New York Mirror reporter Nathaniel Parker Willis who first went to Paris in 1830. Mr. Gopmik describes him as "seeming in retrospect to have done more than any other single writer to set the tone of the American journalist in Paris– that tone of appreciative, high-hearted amusement (with special concentration on food and sex) that runs right through to Waverly Root and Irwin Shaw to every issue of The New York Times travel section."

From a collection of dispatches, "Pencillings by the Way" Willis writes: " There are few things bought with money that are more delightful than a French breakfast. If you take it in your room, it appears in the shape of two small vessels, one of coffee and one of hot milk, two kinds of bread, with a thin, printed slice of butter and one or two of some thirty dishes from which to choose, the latter flavored exquisitely enough to make one wish to always be at breakfast, but cooked and composed I know not how or of what. All this costs a third as much as the beefsteaks and coffee in America and at the same time you are waited upon with a civility that is worth three times the money."

Taken in one bite the 608-page "Americans in Paris" can be a weekend course in expatriate letters or when savored, slowly over the summer its chapters can be a literary aperitif before a barbecue or a civilized nightcap before falling asleep as a gentle wind blows in from an open window.