It is difficult to think of a more self-conscious movement in the history of American letters than that which occurred on the Left Bank of Paris during the 1920s. Gathered in Montparnasse, the fabled Lost Generation spent a decade writing novels and poems about themselves, and the decades thereafter writing their account of those years. Predictably, an avalanche of memoirs, recorded by everyone from Hemingway to his bartender, has provided ample grist for the academic mill, which has responded with collections of letters, biographies, and studies revealing the true identities of fictional characters.

The most recent addition to this catalogue is Humphrey Carpenter’s Geniuses Together: American Writers in Pans in the 1920s. Carpenter, an Englishman who has written biographies of W. H. Auden, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis, approaches his current subject with a wider scope than many of those who have gone before, seeking to trace the development of the entire expatriate literary phenomenon. His prologue begins not with Gertrude Stein but with Benjamin Franklin, chronicling the early relations between the United States and Paris, and then moving to the nineteenth century, when American artists began their pilgrimage to the Right Bank, even as the bohemian life across the river was being celebrated in books and plays. Carpenter finishes setting the table for “the longest-ever literary party” with a chapter each devoted to Stein, Natalie Barney, and Sylvia Beach, who among other things served as points of connection for the wave of expatriates which