Exiled in Paris: Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett, and Others on the Left Bank [Anglais] [Broché]

English author Campbell (Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin) has loosely strung together interesting anecdotes about the group of expatriate writers and artists who lived and worked on the Left Bank after WWII. Several of them were African Americans, including Wright and Baldwin, who were fleeing the racist climate in the U.S. Drawing on interviews and published reminiscences, the author details the feud between the two novelists, fueled by literary rivalry and paranoia. He also focuses on the history of Olympia Press, founded by Maurice Girodias, who with the assistance of Glasgow writer Alexander Trocchi published Lolita, The Story of O and other controversial books. Campbell successfully evokes the flavor of Parisian cafe life in this memoir that will be of great interest to literature devotees. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

Campbell (Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin, LJ 4/1/91) details the passing of the literary torch from the Lost Generation to the Beat Generation. Beginning in the late 1940s with Richard Wright's first meeting in Paris with Gertrude Stein, Campbell opens a window into the early years of Beckett, Baldwin, Nabokov, and Henry Miller; the reigns of Camus and Sartre; each writer's struggle to find a suitable literary voice; and the rise and fall of Olympia Press. He closes the window in 1960 with the deaths of Camus, Boris Vian, and Wright (under suspicious circumstances), all within months of one another. He gives, however, a brief picture of young Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Mailer, just beginning to find their voices. One hopes Campbell's next book picks up right there, because there is much to be learned about the influences writers have on one another and about the importance of freedom of creativity from the tyrannies of race, sex, convention, politics, and economics. Recommended for serious literature collections.?Denise Sticha, Seton Hill Coll. Lib., Greensburg, Pa.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

This slice of Parisian literary life between the Lost and Beat generations is an elegant document of the elemental, the existential, and the erotic in a city and time bathed in blue light. Black expatriate writers are the platform from which Campbell, biographer of James Baldwin, explores other literary outsiders in a weary, disillusioned postwar Paris. In exile were Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and hundreds of other black intellectuals who fled oppressive American racism to be feted in France as true men of letters. Campbell connects these writers--somewhat uneasily--to other literary outsiders in 1940s and 1950s Paris. The publishers of Zero, Points, and Merlin literary magazines, and the erotic/pornographic Olympia Press, moved with the tides of the weary, desperately intellectual French avant-garde. Together they published Sartre, Camus, Beckett, Miller, Genet, and Sade, some for the first time in English. The writer's risks became those publishers' risky fight for freedom--from censorship, restrictive bourgeois values, and civilization itself. This is not the Paris of Hemingway's movable feast or Stein's salons. It was about left or right, published or unpublishable, obscene and outrageous or obscure. Deanna Larson --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

After World War II many writers took advantage of the air of freedom offered by post-war Paris and entered an atmosphere of literary achievement which fostered a movement. Different narratives of writers in exile are woven in a strong plot which describes motivations for leaving other countries and common forces linking the exiles in Paris. An excellent survey, spiced by James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and others. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

"Campbell attains an overview permitting him--better than anyone else, to my knowledge--to bring together writers who are almost always considered independently....The study is invaluable in that Campbell cares deeply about how these writers tried to cope, in their daily lives, with the powerful forces their writings had liberated."--John Taylor, Times Literary Supplement

Exiled in Paris provides a compelling look at the personalities who fueled the literary and philosophical dramas of postwar Paris: James Baldwin, Alexander Trocchi, Boris Vian, Maurice Girodias, and many others. James Campbell provides a fresh look at Samuel Beckett's early career; reveals the facts behind the publication of the scandalous best-seller The Story of O; and tells the poignant story of Richard Wright's years in exile. He captures the sense of deliverance that Wright, so accustomed to daily humiliations in his own country, experienced during his sojourn on the Left Bank, where, for the first time in his life, he was treated as a great man of letters. Here, too, are all the circumstances surrounding Wright's mysterious death, which many close to him regarded as suspicious.

Providing a portrait of the postwar Beat Generation in Paris, a book of bizarre stories includes the publication of the scandalous The Story of O and a chronicle of Richard Wright's years in exile and suspicious death. 15,000 first printing. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

James Campbell is the author of Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin (California, 2002), This Is the Beat Generation: New York, San Francisco, Paris (California, 2001), and Invisible Country: A Journey through Scotland (1990). He works for the Times Literary Supplement.