Pablo Picasso
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Sex, Food, and Surrealism
The last several weeks I have been hard at work on writing projects related to my new book Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America, which is coming out in May 2014. I’ve missed having the time to work on this blog and read more about Americans dining and cooking in Paris, but…
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Legendary Paris Dinner Parties
Scads of American memoirists have rhapsodized about their wonderful meals in Paris’s restaurants, but Janet Flanner, who for decades wrote a fortnightly “Letter from Paris” column for The New Yorker under the pen name Gênet, preferred to recall the dinner parties. It requires a certain longevity spent in a city before invitations to dinner begin pouring in.…
Alice B. Toklas, blanquette de veau, champagne, dinner parties, F. Scott Fitzgerald, France, French cooking, French cuisine, Gerald and Sara Murphy, Gertrude Stein, Isadora Duncan, Janet Flanner, Les Noces, lesbianism, Loie Fuller, Pablo Picasso, Paris, Paul Poiret, pelure d’oignon, Saint-Germain, Stravinsky, Tender is the Night, The New Yorker, the Seine, two buck Chuck, Zelda Fitzgerald -
Montmartre Is Dead!
“Montmartre is dead!” screamed the headline of a February 1924 obituary in The Living Age, an American weekly review. The famed artists’ redoubt on a hill at the northern border of Paris had succumbed to an influx of American money and values. The penniless French artists and poets who had once gathered round the tables of the Lapin…
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The Auto-biography of Alice B. Toklas
The charm of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), Gertrude Stein’s tongue-in-cheek “memoir” of her partner, lies for most readers in its intimate portrayal of Parisian artistic life during the first decades of the twentieth century. The informality of the narrative, a conversational slew of anecdotes featuring the most famous names of twentieth-century arts and letters…
Historian. Novelist. Greedy Woman. 