Memoirs of Montparnasse

John Glassco

Oxford University Press, 1970 - Authors, Canadian - 241 pages

Memoirs of Montparnasse is a delicious book about being young, restless, reckless, and without cares. It is also the best and liveliest of the many chronicles of 1920s Paris and the exploits of the lost generation. In 1928, nineteen-year-old John Glassco escaped Montreal and his overbearing father for the wilder shores of Montparnasse. He remained there until his money ran out and his health collapsed, and he enjoyed every minute of his stay. Remarkable for their candor and humor, Glassco's memoirs have the daft logic of a wild but utterly absorbing adventure, a tale of desire set free that is only faintly shadowed by sadness at the inevitable passage of time. Book jacket.

Contents

• Section 1: 8
• Section 2: 47
• Section 3: 62

About the author

Joseph Leon Edel was born September 9, 1907 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He received a master's degree in English from McGill University in Montreal in 1928 and a doctorate in literature from the University of Paris in 1932. In 1932, he was an assistant professor of English at Sir George Williams University in Montreal. Between 1934 and 1943, he worked as a freelance writer and journalist and in broadcasting. During World War II, he served in the Army. He was a professor of English at New York University from 1953 to 1972 and at the University of Hawaii from 1972 to 1978. His five-volume biography of Henry James, published between 1953 and 1972, has been considered among the finest biographies by and about an American author. Two of the volumes won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1963. He also edited books on James's letters, plays, essays, criticism and stories and wrote introductions to new editions of James's novels. He also wrote critical biographies of Willa Cather and Henry David Thoreau, a book about the Bloomsbury circle entitled A House of Lions, and Wartime Memoir. He was the editor of four volumes of Edmund Wilson's papers. He died on September 5, 1997 at the age of 89.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Memoirs of Montparnasse
• Author: John Glassco
• Contributor: Leon Edel
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1970
• Original from: the University of California
• Digitized: Aug 10, 2007
• ISBN: 0195402022, 9780195402025
• Length: 241 pages