Emigré New York
Subtitle: French Intellectuals in Wartime Manhattan, 1940-1944
Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: February 29, 2000
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 216
ISBN-13: 9780801862861
Subjects: American history: Second World War; Immigration & emigration; Literary studies: from c 1900 -; World history: Second World War; United States - State & Local - General; Second World War, 1939-1945; History; World War, 1939-1945; France - History; Intellectual History; New York (State); History - U.S.; French; History: World; New York; USA; Europe - France; United States - 20th Century/WWII; History / Europe / General; New York City; Refugees; Civilization; 20th century; Exiles; France; Homes and haunts; Intellectuals
First sentence: They were the oddest of political couples, Petain and Laval: deeply distrustful of each other, each plotting to rid himself of the other, but condemned by circumstance to spend the darkest years of French history, the Nazi occupation, in barely interrupted tandem.
Description: "Wartime New York was the city where French Symbolism, in the person of Maurice Maeterlinck, came to live out its last productive years; where French surrealism, in the person of Andre Breton, came to survive; and where French structuralism, in the person of Claude Levi-Strauss, came to be born.

From the largely forgotten prewar visit to the city of Petain and Laval to the seizing, burning, and capsizing of the Normandie, France's floating museum, in the Hudson River, Jeffrey Mehlman evokes the writerly world of French Manhattan, its achievements and feuds, during one of the most vexed periods in French history."--BOOK JACKET.