McCullough tells the story of the American artists and scientists
who studied in Paris, and changed America through what they learned
there.
"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.
"A highly readable and entertaining travelogue of a special sort, an interdisciplinary treat from a tremendously popular Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. . . . Highly recommended." "--Library Journal" (starred review)
David McCullough is the author of several highly acclaimed works of biography and history including TRUMAN (for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993), BRAVE COMPANIONS, THE GREAT BRIDGE and THE JONESTOWN FLOOD. He has also won the LOS ANGELES TIMES Book Award and is twice winner of the National Book Award.
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