Paris
Paris is the city English-language fiction uses when it wants to test an American. Henry James sent Strether there to bring a young man home and watched him change his mind; Hemingway sent a group of expatriates to drink and then to Spain; Dickens put the French Revolution in the same book as a London law court.
The national library grew out of the royal collection and is a legal deposit library, which is why its holdings of nineteenth-century newspapers, serials and prints are so strong. Much of the material that explains how a novel was first published and reviewed is catalogued there and available to readers online.
A library to check
- Bibliothèque nationale de France — catalogues and digital collections, open to readers online
Books connected to Paris
- The Ambassadors — Henry James, 1903. James's masterpiece of late style, where the drama is entirely in what people avoid saying.
- The Sun Also Rises — Ernest Hemingway, 1926. The definitive novel of the lost generation, written with a discipline that hides its own feeling.
- A Little Tour in France — Henry James, 1884. The best kind of literary travel writing: opinionated, unhurried and full of buildings.
A note on accuracy
We describe literary connections and public collections, not street addresses, opening hours or ticket prices. Those change and we cannot verify them for every reader. Follow the institution's own site for current visiting information.