A year in Paris...Since World War II, countless American students
have been lured by that vision - and been transformed by their
sojourn in the City of Light. "Dreaming in French" tells three
stories of that experience, and how it changed the lives of three
extraordinary American women. All three women would go on to become
icons, key figures in American cultural, intellectual, and
political life, but when they embarked for France, they were young,
little known, uncertain about their future, and drawn to the
culture, sophistication, and drama that only Paris could offer. Yet
their backgrounds and their dreams couldn't have been more
different. Jacqueline Bouvier was a twenty-year-old debutante, a
Catholic girl from a wealthy East Coast family. Susan Sontag was
twenty-four, a precocious Jewish intellectual from a North
Hollywood family of modest means, and Paris was a refuge from
motherhood, a failing marriage, and graduate work in philosophy at
Oxford. Angela Davis, a French major at Brandeis from a prominent
African American family in Birmingham, Alabama, found herself the
only black student in her year abroad program - in a summer when
all the news from Birmingham was of unprecedented racial violence.
Kaplan takes readers into the lives, hopes, and ambitions of these
young women, tracing their paths to Paris and tracking the
discoveries, intellectual adventures, friendships, and loves that
they found there. For all three women, France was far from a
passing fancy; rather, Kaplan shows, the year abroad continued to
influence them, a significant part of their intellectual and
cultural makeup, for the rest of their lives. No one who has ever
dreamed of Paris should miss it. Jackie Kennedy carried her love of
France to the White House and to her later career as a book editor,
bringing her cultural and linguistic fluency to everything from art
and diplomacy to fashion and historic restoration-to the extent
that many, including Jackie herself, worried that she might seem
"too French." Sontag found in France a model for the life of the
mind that she was determined to lead; the intellectual world she
observed from afar during that first year in Paris inspired her
most important work and remained a key influence-to be grappled
with, explored, and transcended-the rest of her life. Davis,
meanwhile, found that her Parisian vantage strengthened her sense
of political exile from racism at home and brought a sense of
solidarity with the burgeoning Algerian independence movement. For
her, Paris was a city of political commitment, activism, and
militancy, qualities that would deeply inform her own revolutionary
agenda and soon make her a hero to the French writers she had once
studied. Kaplan, whose own junior year abroad played a prominent
role in her classic memoir, French Lessons, spins these three quite
different stories into one evocative biography, brimming with the
ferment and yearnings of youth and shot through with the knowledge
of how a single year-and a magical city-can change a whole life.
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