Overview
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.
Synopsis
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.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly
One of America’s most popular historians and a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, McCullough (1776) has hit the historical jackpot. Travelers before the telephone era loved to write letters and journals, and McCullough has turned this avalanche of material into an entertaining chronicle of several dozen 19th-century Americans who went to Paris, an immense, supremely civilized city flowing with ideas, the arts, and elegance, where no one spit tobacco juice or defaced public property. They discovered beautiful clothing, delicious food, the art of dining ("The French dine to gratify, we to appease appetite," wrote John Sanderson). Paris had not only pleasures but professional attractions as well. Artists such as Samuel F.B. Morse, Whistler, Sargent, and Cassatt came to train. At a time when American medical education was fairly primitive, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. and other prospective physicians studied at the Sorbonne’s vast hospitals and lecture halls—with tuition free to foreigners. Authors from Cooper to Stowe, Twain, and James sometimes took up residence. McCullough mixes famous and obscure names and delivers capsule biographies of everyone to produce a colorful parade of educated, Victorian-era American travelers and their life-changing experiences in Paris. (May)From the Publisher
“McCullough has hit the historical jackpot. . . . A colorful parade of educated, Victorian-era American travelers and their life-changing experiences in Paris.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Kirkus Reviews
An ambitious, wide-ranging study of how being in Paris helped spark generations of American genius.
Not content to focus on a few of the 19th-century American artists, doctors and statesmen who benefited enormously from their Parisian education, award-winninghistorian McCullough (1776, 2005, etc.) embraces a cluster of aspiring young people such as portraitist George Healy and lawyer Charles Sumner, eager to expand their horizons in the 1830s by enduring the long sea passage, then spirals out to include numerous other visitors over an entire eventful century. In the early period of trans-Atlantic travel, American tourists were truly risking their lives over the weeks of rough sailing, but novelist James Fenimore Cooper, widowed schoolteacher Emma Hart Willard and young medical student Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. all knew their education was not complete without a stint in the medieval capital. For many of these American rubes, exposure to the fine arts, old-world architecture, fashion, fine dining, museums and teaching hospitals proved transformative, and the knowledge they gained would define their professional lives back in America. The year in Paris artist Samuel Morse painted his extraordinaryThe Gallery of the Louvrewould provide the climax of one careerand segue into another—as inventor of the electric telegraph. The revolutionary upheaval of 1848, the advent of the Second Empire and the massive redesign wrought by "demolition artist" Georges-Eugène Haussmann changed Paris profoundly, some said for the better, while the Americans continued to arrive: sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Congressman Elihu B. Washburne and painter Mary Cassatt, among many others. For some, like John Singer Sargent, who had been brought up traversing European capitals, their time spent in Paris would reveal what made them quintessentially American.
A gorgeously rich, sparkling patchwork, eliciting stories from diaries and memoirs to create the human drama McCullough depicts so well.
Michael Sims
The Greater Journey is a lively and entertaining panorama, with abundant details along the way. A parade must keep moving, and McCullough is a practiced hand at managing such a cast. His specialty is clarity. His voice is straightforward, more journalistic than literary despite its largely artistic subject matter.—The Washington Post
Stacy Schiff
…[McCullough] explores the intellectual legacy that France settled on its 19th-century visitors. The result is an epic of ideas, as well as an exhilarating book of spells…McCullough's grand tour is impressionistic and discursive, proceeding by way of crossed paths and capsule biographies. This is history to be savored rather than sprinted through, like a Parisian meal. It amounts to a meaty collection of short stories, expertly and flavorfully assembled, free of gristly theory.—The New York Times
The Barnes & Noble Review
"Not all pioneers went west" -- with these charming, if misleading words, David McCullough launches his long, fascinating account of American residents in Paris in the nineteenth century.
They were not pioneers, of course, in the usual sense. There were no covered wagons, no endless plains and empty prairies, no hostile natives (except for the occasional glowering concierge). Instead, McCullough, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Truman and John Adams, has given a new twist to the idea of blazing a trail and has taken for his subject a version of that oldest and richest of literary dramas, as ancient at least as Homer and Odysseus: Someone Goes on a Great Journey. And he has given it a distinctively American form -- The New World Meets the Old.
His cast of characters is refreshingly original. He skips right past those first celebrated American expatriates in the City of Light, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, and begins his story in the 1830s, with a wave of young New Englanders who, over the course of the decade, cast off from Boston in two-masted sailing ships and made the dangerous, arduous month-long voyage to Le Havre. From there they rumbled off in enormous fifteen-passenger stagecoaches called diligences for the twenty-four hour bone-cracking trip to Paris, usually stopping at Rouen to stretch their legs and view for the first time the astonishing beauty of a medieval Catholic cathedral.
Some fifty years earlier Abigail Adams had written a friend from Paris, with an audible snort of Puritan disapproval: "If you ask me what is the business of life here? I answer, pleasure." It was -- and still is, mercifully -- an accurate description of Parisian life, but McCullough's travelers, though not immune to pleasure, all came with deeply serious purposes. Roughly speaking, they were divided between artists and medical students, both groups drawn by the fact that what Paris offered in the way of resources and schooling could be duplicated nowhere else in the world, certainly not in the turbulent, rollicking cultural adolescence of Jacksonian America.
This first wave of Americans in Paris includes some familiar names -- Samuel F. B. Morse, who began his life as a painter before becoming "The Lightning Man," inventor of the telegraph; Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., who would become dean of the Harvard Medical School and a founder of The Atlantic Monthly; Charles Sumner, later senator from Massachusetts and leading abolitionist. But there are less familiar pilgrims as well -- Holmes's friend Thomas Appleton, for example, author of the much-repeated quip, "Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris." Or Emma Willard, founder of the Troy (New York) Female Seminary, who frowned at the French tolerance for nude statues, but became a great opera-goer and student of ladies' fashions.
McCullough loads these pages with marvelous anecdotes and word pictures. We have Morse swaying at the top of a rickety scaffold as he copies paintings in the Louvre, observed and encouraged by none other than James Fenimore Cooper, a long-time Parisian. We follow his young Bostonians into a restaurant at the Palais Royal, where they goggle at the immense number of mirrors and at menus the size of newspapers. We watch over Sumner's shoulder as he recognizes, in a life-altering flash of insight, that the black students in his classroom at the Sorbonne are as able as the whites. McCullough has a keen eye for the memorable quotation -- Nathaniel Willis writes of the ballerina Marie Taglioni, "She swims in your eye like a curl of smoke." His long chapter on American medical students is particularly absorbing, as he traces their daily routines in the Latin Quarter's renowned École de Médecine. Though if we needed reminding of the primitive nature of nineteenth-century medicine, we have only to turn to his horrifying account of surgery in the school's amphitheatre, when as many as 600 students could practice operations at the same time. (The discarded limbs and body parts were fed to dogs kept in cages outside.)
But as the century wears on, as sailing ships and diligences are replaced by steamships and trains, McCullough's narrative grows more diffuse and less focused. There were perhaps fewer than a thousand Americans resident in Paris when his first wave arrives from New England in the 1830s. After the Civil War, travel is far easier and cheaper and their numbers swell. By 1867 the number of American residents in Paris quadruples. His small band of "pioneers" becomes a parade of tourists and famous names -- Hawthorne, Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, P. T. Barnum -- all of them drawn to Paris like moths to a candle, but none of them united in purpose (or age) as the earlier band had been. For pages at a time Paris seems a background rather than a theme.
Then, in two superb chapters on the now obscure American ambassador Elihu Washburne, McCullough regains his momentum. Using a long-forgotten diary from Washburne's family papers, he reconstructs in thrilling detail the ambassador's heroic behavior during the Prussian Siege of Paris in 1870 and the bloodcurdling days of the Commune that followed. It is a wonderful fusion of character description and historical research. And from this point on, McCullough concentrates in satisfying and often moving detail on the careers of three great American artists who find their inspiration and release in the great Capital of Art: the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens and the painters John Singer Sargent and Mary Cassatt.
There are a few small errors of fact (Washburne, for example, was not present when Grant met Lee at Appomattox) and some readers may wonder why Emerson, who had a visionary transcendentalist moment in the Jardin des Plantes, is not given more space, or why no use is made of Peter Brooks's recent brilliant book Henry James Goes to Paris. But these would be quibbles. On the great central thing, the indefinable power of Paris to awaken a sense of beauty, he is exactly right. He quotes Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose love of Paris grew in part from her feeling that American life had cheated her: "With all New England's earnestness and practical efficiency, there is a long withering of the soul's more ethereal part -- a crushing out of the beautiful -- which is horrible."
But David McCullough, though he also lives in New England, has clearly suffered no such crushing of the soul's ethereal part. He is seventy-eight years old, yet his book reads like a young man's book -- full of enthusiasm, fresh pleasure, delight in the world, and delight especially in the great luminous city that seems as he writes to lie open before him like a poem.
--Max Byrd