Exiled in Paris: Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett, and Others on the Left Bank - Hardcover

James Campbell is the author of Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin (California, 2002), This Is the Beat Generation: New York, San Francisco, Paris (California, 2001), and Invisible Country: A Journey through Scotland (1990). He works for the Times Literary Supplement.

This slice of Parisian literary life between the Lost and Beat generations is an elegant document of the elemental, the existential, and the erotic in a city and time bathed in blue light. Black expatriate writers are the platform from which Campbell, biographer of James Baldwin, explores other literary outsiders in a weary, disillusioned postwar Paris. In exile were Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and hundreds of other black intellectuals who fled oppressive American racism to be feted in France as true men of letters. Campbell connects these writers--somewhat uneasily--to other literary outsiders in 1940s and 1950s Paris. The publishers of Zero, Points, and Merlin literary magazines, and the erotic/pornographic Olympia Press, moved with the tides of the weary, desperately intellectual French avant-garde. Together they published Sartre, Camus, Beckett, Miller, Genet, and Sade, some for the first time in English. The writer's risks became those publishers' risky fight for freedom--from censorship, restrictive bourgeois values, and civilization itself. This is not the Paris of Hemingway's movable feast or Stein's salons. It was about left or right, published or unpublishable, obscene and outrageous or obscure. Deanna Larson