The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris – David McCullough

The Greater Journey is the enthralling, inspiring story of adventurous American artists, writers, doctors, politicians, architects who set off for Paris in the years between 1830 and 1900, ambitious to excel in their work.

Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female doctor in America; Charles Sumner, who enrolled at the Sorbonne because of a burning desire to know more about everything; James Fenimore Cooper and Samuel F. B. Morse, worked unrelentingly every day in Paris, Cooper writing and Morse painting what would be his masterpiece. Pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk from New Orleans; George P. A. Healy, who 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. Writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, and Henry James were all “discovering” Paris, marveling at the treasures in the Louvre. “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.