Dreaming in French - Alice Kaplan

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. 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 \u201ctoo French.\u201d 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
Algerian independence. 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. No one who has ever dreamed of Paris should miss it.