Ernest Hemingway and Fitzgerald on the Expatriate Experiance

Hemingway and Fitzgerald on the Expatriate Experiance

"You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed with sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see?" (Sun Also Rises, 115)1

Paris in the 1920's was a place that seemed to embody dynamic artistic achievement. Many of the great artists of modernist movements were either there or had passed through at some point. It became the living embodiment of the old joke "So Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Modigliani walk into a bar..." For Americans traveling to Paris after the war with artistic intentions, it was a win-win situation: Freedom from stultifying artistic conventions and the burgeoning corporate culture, and life in a bohemian community with cheap francs, an old order debunked by the war, and an already established network of expatriate heavy hitters (Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound). Even among the American expatriate class, however, there was a division between groups. There were those who went to Paris to fully immerse themselves in the bohemian lifestyle (even if part of it was more show than reality) and interact and bicker with other self-proclaimed artists, while the other went to Paris due to its burgeoning reputation as a place to see and be seen among the literati (much like the latest trendy eatery in Los Angeles). Some were there for the art, others for the atmosphere. Hemingway, in his retrospective "A Movable Feast", would consider himself a staunch member of the former and Fitzgerald a hopeless member of the latter. While Paris had a crucial formative effect on Hemingway that it did not have on Fitzgerald, it would be...

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...n R. French Connections: Hemingway and Fizgerald Abroad, St. Martin's Press, 1998

4. http://ntsrv2000.educ.ualberta.ca/nethowto/examples/bradley/mansfiel/paris.htm

5. http://www.lib.unc.edu/rbc/french_expatriates/paris.html

[1] Kennedy, J. Gerald and Bryer, Jackson R. French Connections: Hemingway and Fizgerald Abroad, pg 1

[2] Kennedy, J. Gerald and Bryer, Jackson R. French Connections: Hemingway and Fizgerald Abroad, pg 6

[3] 5

[4] Hemingway, Ernest A Moveable Feast, pg 69

[5] Hemingway, Ernest A Moveable Feast, pg 35-36

[6] Kennedy, J. Gerald and Bryer, Jackson R. French Connections: Hemingway and Fizgerald Abroad, pg 233

[7] Kennedy, J. Gerald and Bryer, Jackson R. French Connections: Hemingway and Fizgerald Abroad, pg 167

[8] Kennedy, J. Gerald and Bryer, Jackson R. French Connections: Hemingway and Fizgerald Abroad, pg