Wahl, Jean

(May 25, 1888 - June 19, 1974) Jean Wahl was a French philospher and professor at the Sorbonne from 1936 to 1967, though he was absent during WWII as he was detained in a Jewish concentration camp in Paris and later escaped to the U.S. where he stayed from 1942 to 1945.
While exiled in the U.S. he helped form the 'university in exile', the École Libre des Hautes Études, in New York.  Later he founded Décades de Mount Holyoke with meetings held at Mount Holyoke where he had a teaching position.  These meetings gathered together French intellectuals in wartime exile, ostensibly studying the English language, with Americans including Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens and Roger Sessions. Wahl, already a published poet, made translations of poems of Stevens into French (1).  
In 1946 he founded the Collège philosophique, influential center for non-conformist intellectuals, alternative to the Sorbonne.[3] Starting in 1950, he headed the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale (1).
==References==
#Wahl, Jean