Volume 30, Number 13 · August 18, 1983

Joyce and Company

By Robert M. Adams
Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties
by Noel Riley Fitch

Norton, 447 pp., $25.00

The generation of English-speaking writers who congregated in Paris just after the First World War, if they were 'lost' at the time, have since been more than adequately 'found.' Since the Second World War, literary critics, biographers, historians, and writers of memoirs have been gleaning the fields. Joyce (who never was lost in the first place), Pound, Ford, Hemingway, Wyndham Lewis, Fitzgerald, Stein, and Beckett have been the subjects, sometimes the objects, of investigations galore. Their deeds and misdeeds, their writings formal and informal, their feuds, innuendoes, and affairs have been thoroughly chronicled; their dozens of epigones, enemies, intimates, admirers, and associates have been studied down to the minute particulars. So too have the many artists and musicians who were their influential contemporaries, not to mention the French writers—Gide, Valéry, Cocteau, Claudel, Colette—who shared the city with them.



Review, 2435 words

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