$37.50
ISBN-13: 9781416571766
Availability: Shipped to Tattered Cover in 3 to 7 days
Published: Simon & Schuster, 10/2011
The Greater Journey is the enthralling, inspiring?and until now, untold?story of the
adventurous American artists, writers, doctors, politicians, architects, and others of
high aspiration who set off for Paris in the years between 1830 and 1900, ambitious to
excel in their work.
After risking the hazardous journey across the Atlantic, these Americans embarked on a
greater journey in the City of Light. Most had never left home, never experienced a
different culture. None had any guarantee of success. That they achieved so much for
themselves and their country profoundly altered American history. As David McCullough
writes, ?Not all pioneers went west.? Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female doctor in
America, was one of this intrepid band. Another was Charles Sumner, who enrolled at the
Sorbonne because of a burning desire to know more about everything. There he saw black
students with the same ambition he had, and when he returned home, he would become the
most powerful, unyielding voice for abolition in the U.S. Senate, almost at the cost of
his life.
Two staunch friends, James Fenimore Cooper and Samuel F. B. Morse, worked unrelentingly
every day in Paris, Cooper writing and Morse painting what would be his masterpiece. From
something he saw in France, Morse would also bring home his momentous idea for the
telegraph.
Pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk from New Orleans launched his spectacular career
performing in Paris at age 15. George P. A. Healy, who had almost no money and little
education, took the gamble of a lifetime and with no prospects whatsoever in Paris became
one of the most celebrated portrait painters of the day. His subjects included Abraham
Lincoln.
Medical student Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote home of his toil and the exhilaration in
?being at the center of things? in what was then the medical capital of the world. From
all they learned in Paris, Holmes and his fellow ?medicals? were to exert lasting
influence on the profession of medicine in the United States.
Writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, and Henry James were all
?discovering? Paris, marveling at the treasures in the Louvre, or out with the Sunday
throngs strolling the city?s boulevards and gardens. ?At last I have come into a
dreamland,? wrote Harriet Beecher Stowe, seeking escape from the notoriety Uncle Tom?s
Cabin had brought her. Almost forgotten today, the heroic American ambassador Elihu
Washburne bravely remained at his post through the Franco-Prussian War, the long Siege of
Paris and even more atrocious nightmare of the Commune. His vivid account in his diary of
the starvation and suffering endured by the people of Paris (drawn on here for the first
time) is one readers will never forget. The genius of sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens,
the son of an immigrant shoemaker, and of painters Mary Cassatt and John Singer Sargent,
three of the greatest American artists ever, would flourish in Paris, inspired by the
examples of brilliant French masters, and by Paris itself.
Nearly all of these Americans, whatever their troubles learning French, their spells of
homesickness, and their suffering in the raw cold winters by the Seine, spent many of the
happiest days and nights of their lives in Paris. McCullough tells this sweeping,
fascinating story with power and intimacy, bringing us into the lives of remarkable men
and women who, in Saint-Gaudens?s phrase, longed ?to soar into the blue.? The Greater
Journey is itself a masterpiece.
