April in Paris

This article originally appeared in the Winter 2003 issue of St. Olaf Magazine.

Paris has always been a magical city. Never more so than during the 1920s, when the city was a creative mecca to dozens of writers, artists and musicians, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, e.e. cummings, T.S. Eliot and Cole Porter. It was in Paris that Gertrude Stein read Ernest Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises, and then advised him, “Start over and concentrate.” He did. Over drinks at the sidewalk café Closerie des Lilas, where Hemingway worked daily on his revision, Fitzgerald gifted him with a copy of his own just-published novel, The Great Gatsby.

“There was a lot of cross-fertilization in the arts in Paris
during the ’20s,” says St. Olaf Professor of English Eric Nelson, who along with artist and writer Riki Kölbl Nelson ’87, will lead a Study Travel group to Paris in April 2004. “Paris was the European center of modern and progressive art. The Impressionism and Post-Impressionism movements were founded and blossomed there. Young expatriate writers, poets, musicians and artists came to Paris to share their work, their ideas and their passions, often in the great cafés of Montparnasse and St. Germaine.”

The Nelsons will take Study Travelers to the cafés where the expatriates worked, ate and drank — the Flore, Les Deux Magots, the Closerie des Lilas — and will examine the unusual importance cafés have traditionally had in French artistic, social and intellectual life. The group also will visit Shakespeare and Company, a bookstore/library once presided over by Sylvia Beach, the first to publish Joyce’s Ulysses in book form. Hemingway devotes a chapter to Shakespeare and Company in A Moveable Feast.

“In its present incarnation at Rue de la Bucherie, Shakespeare and Company is still a lively center of literary life,” says Eric Nelson. “It’s run by Walt Whitman’s grandson, who hosts weekly poetry readings and a Sunday evening tea party.”

Study Travelers also will explore the Bohemian lifestyle and the romantic notion of the artist, visiting the Musée Picasso and the Musée d’Orsay. “We will wander through the magnificent Jardins du Luxembourg where Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas went for walks, as did Hemingway, when he couldn’t afford to buy lunch,” Nelson says. Optional activities include a trip to a jazz club and a boat trip on the river Seine.

Interested? Contact the Center for Lifelong Learning at
(507) 646-3066 or, toll-free, (866) 255-6523.

— Carole Leigh Engblom is editor of St. Olaf Magazine and a media relations specialist at St. Olaf College.