The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris

by David Mc Cullough (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2012

  $23.08

  After risking the hazardous journey across the Atlantic, these Americans embarked on a greater journey in the City of Light. That they achieved so much for themselves and their country profoundly altered American history. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female doctor in America, was one of this intrepid band. Another was Charles Sumner, who would become the most powerful, unyielding voice for abolition in the U.S. Senate. Writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, and Henry James were all discovering Paris, marveling at the treasures in the Louvre, or out with the Sunday throngs strolling the city's boulevards and gardens. At last I have come into a dreamland, wrote Harriet Beecher Stowe, seeking escape from the notoriety Uncle Tom's Cabinhad brought her. McCullough tells this sweeping, fascinating story with power and intimacy, bringing us into the lives of remarkable men and women.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2011

  $4.71

  The Greater Journey focuses on the period between 1830 and 1900, when hundreds of Americans--many of them future household names like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Mark Twain, Samuel Morse, John Singer Sargent and Harriet Beecher Stowe--migrated to Paris. McCullough shows first how the City of Light affected each of them in turn, and how they later moved back to America to help shape American art, medicine, writing, science, and politics in profound ways.The Greater Journey is filled with wonderful descriptions of the old Paris before it was re-made by Haussmann's grand boulevards, and of the city's great places, especially the Louvre, the Tuileries, and Notre Dame, which never failed to inspire visitors and expatriates.