This is a enjoyably breezy popular history of a slice of the Parisian intellectual world of the 1940s and 50s, focussing on a group of writers clustered around Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus, with a few non-literary cultural figures thrown in for good measure. There is lot of emphasis on their social milieu, politics, and lifestyle, especially their love affairs, about which it is energetically and unabashedly gossipy. The book does not have a great deal to say about the ideas or artistic achievements per se of these figures except in the most general terms, and one might with some justice disparage this effort as a cheesily breathless and superficial story of the sex lives of great writers, awash in cliché about the nature of individual genius, and the collective genius of Paris as a whole, the whole self-indulgent, deeply bourgeois escapist fantasy of not being bourgeois. But that would miss something interesting this book achieves. Its limitations seem to be by design; the purpose of the book is to offer a grand, both panoramic and detailed, and decidedly Romantic portrait of a great society at a moment of cultural and political ferment, with the vivid characterization, breadth and something of the spirit of Carné’s great film of the time, Enfants du Paradis, if not with its depth. As a portrait of Paris as a much beloved mythological organism, to some extent the cultural heart of the West through much of the 20th century, as it sees itself and as those who love it like to imagine it, it succeeds very well, and this sort of portrait, while not necessarily critical, balanced, or objective, is still a necessary and useful one. And certainly, it is enjoyable, even if it is a guilty pleasure. This is first-rate literary popcorn, impossible not to finish, and one gets the feeling that the book might have gone on indefinitely, as it ends abruptly with hardly an attempt to justify wrapping up the narrative at that point. Entertaining, full of delicious anecdotes, and slightly shameful, it is a perfect Parisian literary carnival.

There's no shortage of literature written about the famous Lost Generation of writers who populated Paris in the 1920's, and I have read my share. I was totally unfamiliar with the dynamic society of writers who made Paris their home between 1940 and 1950. This book filled that void in my knowledge about the intellectual society of Paris during that period.

The book unfolds around the circle of Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Camus but the allure of the city and its cafe culture attracted jazz musicians, aspiring journalists, playwrights, and every garden variety of intellectual that your mind could possibly conjure.

It was easy to occasionally get bogged down by the day-t0-day domestic situations of these free-spirited individuals who seemed so intent to make their life an art form of its own, but the reward for this reader is an understanding of the striking differences between the life of these "public intellectuals" in Europe and the corresponding lifestyle of writers in America. The "ah-ha moment" for me was the statement from Richard Wright (author of NATIVE SON) that in New York he was recognized as "a successful Black novelist" and in Paris he was simply acknowledged as a writer. The sense that the society he moved in was color-blind was enough for him to move permanently to France .

I was also intrigued by the divergent reactions of de Beauvoir, Sarte and Camus to experiences lecturing/touring America. For the most part, they were individuals with no particular interest in money (nor a specific lack of it), but after the deprivations of Europe during WW2, at least one of them was dismayed by the American exuberance for possessions --- it was just not something these very liberal individualists could identify with. But, the issue that will stay with me for some time is de Beauvoir's puzzlement that American's "don't talk about ideas" (or anything of substance) --- conversation "in society" was pleasant and meaningless and she was totally baffled by this.

It was fascinating to be absorbed into a society of intellectuals whose primary "product" was their lifestyle. In some instances the writers' acknowledged that they were so busy "connecting" with each other and discussing their sexual and social politics that they didn't have time to write and it was then necessary to accept the fact that they were no longer writers, but "public intellectuals." I honestly can't think of a group of people in this country that we would classify as such now.