Even the most causal readers of literature are basically aware of the deep impact of France upon American authors — but the Transatlantic literary relationship is not just a one-way route.
We invite you to explore these classic American and French titles that offer contrasting perspectives of two great countries through the eyes of writers at once endlessly fascinated and yet frequently frustrated with one another.
Jean de Crevecoeur – Letters from an American Farmer (1782)
“What then is the American, this new man?”
Letters from an American Farmer was published in London in 1782, just as the idea of an “American” was becoming a reality. Those epistolary essays introduced the European public to America’s landscape and customs and have since served as the iconic description of a then-new people. The “American Farmer” of the title is Crèvecoeur’s fictional persona Farmer James, a bumpkin from rural Pennsylvania. Born in Normandy, Crèvecoeur traveled throughout the colonies as a surveyor and trader, and was naturalized in 1765. (1)
Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America (1835)
“The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colors breaking through.”
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59) came to America in 1831 to see what a great republic was like. What struck him most was the country’s equality of conditions, its democracy. The book he wrote on his return to France, Democracy in America, is both the best ever written on democracy and the best ever written on America. It remains the most often quoted book about the United States, not only because it has something to interest and please everyone, but also because it has something to teach everyone. (2)
Henry James – The American (1877)
“People are proud only when they have something to loser, and humble when they have something to gain.”
Henry James brilliantly combines comedy, tragedy, romance, and melodrama in this tale of a wealthy American businessman in Paris. Determined to marry Claire de Cintré, a scintillating and beautiful aristocrat, Christopher Newman comes up against the machinations of her impoverished but proud family in a dramatic clash between the Old World and the New. (3)
Villiers de l’Isle-Adam – L’Ève future (1886)
“I have come with this message: since our gods and our aspirations are no longer anything but scientific, why shouldn’t our loves be so too?”
With Thomas Edison as its central character, it depicts the French fascination with and fear of growing American political and scientific power. Although set in the United States and with no French characters, this is a prescient reflection on the burgeoning American hegemony, as perceived by the French. (4)
Henry James – The Ambassadors (1903)
“He watched little brisk figures, figures whose movement was as the tick of the great Paris clock… the air had a taste as of something mixed with art, something that presented nature as a white-capped master-chef.”
First published in 1903, the novel follows middle-aged Lambert Strether as he is dispatched from Massachusetts to Paris by his wealthy fiancée to rescue her son, Chad Newsome, from the corrupting influences of Europe and its wicked women. Once the mild-mannered and inexperienced Strether arrives in Paris, however, Chad introduces him to a world that he finds refined and sophisticated, rather than debauched and base. (5)
Edith Wharton – The Custom of the Country (1913)
“She wanted, passionately and persistently, two things which she believed should subsist together in any well-ordered life: amusement and respectability.”
Published in 1913 just after Edith Wharton finalized her divorce and permanently moved to France, The Custom of the Country is a scathing novel of manners in which an undereducated, small-town girl claws her way to the top of the American expatriate world and becomes a leading figure in Parisian society… It chronicles the American take-over of a large section of Paris which becomes an American colony. (6)
Gertrude Stein – Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)
“After a while I murmured to Picasso that I liked his portrait of Gertrude Stein. Yes, he said, everybody says that she does not look like it but that does not make any difference, she will, he said.”
Considered one of the richest and most irreverent biographies in history, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was written by Gertrude Stein in the style and voice of her life partner, Alice B. Toklas. Recounting the vibrant and literary life the two make for themselves among the Parisian avant-garde, Alice opens the doors to the prominent salons they held in their home at rue de Fleurus, hosting fellow expatriate American writers such as Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound as well as artists Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Man Ray, and speaks of the twilight of the Paris belle epoque. (7)
Scott Fitzgerald – Tender is the Night (1934)
“She smiled, a moving childish smile that was like all the lost youth in the world.”
Set in the South of France in the decade after World War I, Tender Is the Night is the story of a brilliant and magnetic psychiatrist named Dick Diver; the bewitching, wealthy, and dangerously unstable mental patient, Nicole, who becomes his wife; and the beautiful, harrowing ten-year pas de deux they act out along the border between sanity and madness. (8)
Henry Miller – Tropic of Cancer (1934)
“It is now the fall of my second year in Paris. I was sent here for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom.”
Now hailed as an American classic, Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller’s masterpiece, was banned as obscene in this country for twenty-seven years after its first publication in Paris in 1934. Only a historic court ruling that changed American censorship standards, ushering in a new era of freedom and frankness in modern literature, permitted the publication of this first volume of Miller’s famed mixture of memoir and fiction, which chronicles with unapologetic gusto the bawdy adventures of a young expatriate writer, his friends, and the characters they meet in Paris in the 1930s. Tropic of Cancer is now considered, as Norman Mailer said, “one of the ten or twenty great novels of our century. (9)
Les Mandarins – Simone de Beauvoir (1954)
“Surviving one’s own life, living on the other side of it like a spectator, is quite comfortable after all. You no longer expect anything, no longer fear anything, and every hour is like a memory.”
The love affair between Anne (French) and Lewis (American) brings into focus the complex, often conflicted relation between France and the United States during the post-war, Cold War era. Les Mandarins begins in the heady times just after the liberation of Paris, and traces the slow decay of the initial optimism and enthusiasm at the possibility of creating a new, more just society. What becomes increasingly apparent in the course of the narrative is the difficulty, perhaps the impossibility, of affecting meaningful social change. (10)
Jean Echenoz – Cherokee (1962)
“It was cool, the light was white, the air heavy and silent.”
A novel-length meditation mixing crime, Jazz, new-wave cinema, and slapstick, its surface plot follows an naïve young man’s pursuit of a dreamy woman. Its subtext, however, concerns the massive influx of American products and culture in the aftermath of World War II. Although a large-scale fear of how these elements would threaten the French Way of Life remained prevalent, the novel maintains that French culture is strong enough not only to absorb these influences, but to rebrand and integrate them into mainstream French culture. (11)
Ernest Hemingway – A Moveable Feast (1964)
“There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other.”
Ernest Hemingway’s classic memoir of Paris in the 1920s remains one of his most beloved works. A Moveable Feast brilliantly evokes the exuberant mood of Paris after World War I and the youthful spirit, unbridled creativity, and unquenchable enthusiasm that Hemingway himself epitomized. It is an elegy to a remarkable group of expatriates and a testament to the risks and rewards of the writerly life. (12)
Jean Baudrillard – Amérique (1986)
“America is neither a dream nor a reality, it is a hyperreality.”
Jean Baudrillard’s Amérique argues that Europeans have failed to understand that although the Old World may envy aspects of American talent, consciously or not, Americans remain largely indifferent to what Europe has to offer, or if something does strike their fancy, they will simply appropriate it. The European perception of Americans as naive or lacking in depth is of little consequence to the latter. (13)
Diane Johnson – Le Divorce (1997)
“Well, their piety is more evolved,” said Mrs. Pace. “In America we have only two forms, as Matthew Arnold said: the bitter and the smug. In France, it appears, there is a third type, the worldly.”
Le Divorce, a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction and a national bestseller, is Diane Johnson’s delightfully witty account of the adventures of two sisters from California who make a modern pilgrimage to the City of Light. Isabel Walker, film school dropout, arrives in Paris to help her older step-sister Roxeanne during the final weeks of her second pregnancy. Isabel intends to use the trip to delay getting her life in gear and to pick up a little French culture, though she can’t be bothered to learn the language. Arriving just as Roxy’s perfect husband, Charles-Henri, walks out on her, Isabel quickly undergoes a crash course in the secret codes and intricacies of French social behavior. (14)
Dominique Faulkner – Ça n’existe pas l’Amérique (2010)
“To each his own America.”
Dominique Faulkner’s Ça n’existe pas l’Amérique “chronicles one man’s trek from Chicago to Missoula, Montana during which he encounters ordinary and extraordinary Americans (at times the same people) and often unusual scenery. Most importantly, it sketches a new way of looking at the United States, and as such it provides an excellent example of French literary efforts to explore alternative avenues to the examination of the American experience. (15)
(1) From the Harvard University Press 2013 edition description
(2) From the University of Chicago Press 2000 edition description
(3) From the Signet Classics 2005 edition description
(4) From Frères Ennemis: The French in American Literature, Americans in French Literature by William Cloonan (Liverpool University Press, 2018)
(5) From the Penguin Random House 2016 edition description
(6) From Frères Ennemis: The French in American Literature, Americans in French Literature
(7) From the Penguin Press 2020 edition description
(8) From the Scribner 1996 edition description
(9) From the Grove Atlantic 1971 edition description
(10) From Frères Ennemis: The French in American Literature, Americans in French Literature
(11) From Frères Ennemis: The French in American Literature, Americans in French Literature
(12) From the Scribner 1996 edition description
(13) From Frères Ennemis: The French in American Literature, Americans in French Literature
(14) From the Penguin Random House 2003 edition description
(15) From Frères Ennemis: The French in American Literature, Americans in French Literature