The Left Bank: Writers, Artists, and Politics from the Popular Front to the Cold War - Softcover

Lottman, Herbert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226493687 ISBN 13: 9780226493688

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1998

Synopsis

This story begins in the Paris of the 1930s, when artists and writers stood at the center of the world stage. In the decade that saw the rise of the Nazis, much of the thinking world sought guidance from this extraordinary group of intellectuals. Herbert Lottman's chronicle follows the influential players—Gide, Malraux, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Koestler, Camus, and their pro-Fascist counterparts—through the German occupation, Liberation, and into the Cold War, when the struggle between superpowers all but drowned out their voices.

"Surprisingly fresh and intense. . . . A retrospective travelogue of the Left Bank in the days when it was the setting for almost all French intellectual activity. . . . Absorbing."—Naomi Bliven, New Yorker

"As an introduction to a period in French history already legendary, The Left Bank is superb."—Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World

"An intellectual history. A history of the interaction between politics and letters. And a rumination on the limitless credulity of intellectuals."—Christopher Hitchens, New Statesman

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

PW international correspondent Lottman, long based in Paris, chronicles the political involvement of such influential artists and intellectuals as Picasso, Breton, Gide, Sartre, de Beauvoir and Camus in the '30s and '40s. ``A model piece of social and intellectual history--and a poignant reminder of a time when artists and writers were voices of real power in the land,'' said PW.

Copyright 1991 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226493687
• ISBN 13: 9780226493688
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 335