Books like Man Ray's Montparnasse by Herbert R. Lottman

Patti Smith’s memoir charts her life in New York City, from the bohemian scenes of Max’s Kansas City and the Hotel Chelsea to a creative partnership with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in Brooklyn.

Ernest Hemingway’s Louisiana‑born narrator takes readers through the 1920s Lost Generation—expatriates on Paris’s Left Bank, bullfights in Spain, and the era’s moral and spiritual unraveling.

Posthumously published, Hemingway’s *A Moveable Feast* is a memoir of his Paris years in the 1920s, detailing his early career, intimate relationships, and encounters with other literary figures of the Lost Generation.

Paul Fussell examines the British experience on the Western Front, exploring how poets and memoirists shaped the cultural memory of World War I.

David McCullough chronicles the extraordinary travels of American artists, writers, physicians, and intellectuals who ventured to Paris between 1830 and 1900, revealing how their daring experiences reshaped American cultural and historical life.

Robert Mapplethorpe was one of the most famous and controversial figures in the contemporary art world. Some of his photographs were praised for their startlingly beautiful composition, others condemned for their explicit sexuality. He was an artistic enigma. In 1989, three months after Mapplethorpe's death at forty-two, the Corcoran Gallery of Art canceled a show of his work, igniting a fierce battle over federal funding of "objectionable" art. When the exhibit arrived in Cincinnati a year later, the Center for Contemporary Art and its director were ordered to stand trial on obscenity charges - the first time a gallery in the United States faced prosecution for the art it displayed. In this remarkable biography, Patricia Morrisroe chronicles Mapplethorpe's singular life and the development of his unique art against the background of American culture during the sixties, seventies, and eighties. Mapplethorpe: A Biography reveals a life even more daring than the photographer's art. Selected by Mapplethorpe to write his story, Patricia Morrisroe conducted numerous interviews with the artist before his death, as well as with hundreds of people who knew him during the different periods of his life. Powerful and provocative, Mapplethorpe is the definitive biography of one of America's most celebrated photographers.

Artist writes of his life and loves, his art, his techniques, and artistic experiments.

Born in Brooklyn, Man Ray began his career as a commercial artist and photographer, and as a colleague of Marcel Duchamp and the New York Dadaists. He moved to Paris in 1921 and quickly became one of the most celebrated experimentalists of his time, joining Andre Breton, Max Ernst, Tristan Tzara, and Paul Eluard at the vanguard of Surrealism. Among his innovations was the technique of solarization, which bestowed a ghostly silver aura on his sitters. Included here are Man Ray's portraits of Breton, Yves Tanguy, Jean Cocteau, Lee Miller, Salvador Dali, Joan Miro, and Gertrude Stein, now classic images that embody the idea of the creative persona. Here too are his endlessly inventive assembled objects and a selection of his striking fashion spreads for Vanity Fair, Vogue, and Harper's Bazaar, as well as his notorious photograph Le Violon d'Ingres, and Noire et Blanche, which in 1994 attracted the highest price ever paid to date for a photograph at auction.

Handsome, gifted, wealthy Americans with homes in Paris and on the French Riviera, Gerald and Sara Murphy were at the very center of expatriate cultural and social life during the modernist ferment of the 1920s. Gerald Murphy - witty, urbane, and elusive - was a giver of magical parties and an acclaimed painter. Sara Murphy, an enigmatic beauty who wore her pearls to the beach, enthralled and inspired Pablo Picasso (he painted her both clothed and nude), Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The models for Nicole and Dick Diver in Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night, the Murphys also counted among their friends John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, Fernand Leger, Archibald MacLeish, Cole Porter, and a host of others. Yet none of the artists who used the Murphys for their models fully captured the real story of their lives: their Edith Wharton childhoods, their unexpected youthful romance, their ten-year secret courtship, their complex and enduring marriage - and the tragedy that struck them, when the world they had created seemed most perfect, in what Gerald called "our most vulnerable spot, our children.". Amanda Vaill's account of the Murphys and their friends follows them through the whole arc of their glittering and sometimes tragic lives - the first such account to do so. Drawing on a hitherto untapped wealth of family diaries, photographs, letters and other papers, as well as on archival research and interviews on two continents. Vail has documented the pivotal role of the Murphys in the interplay of cultures that gave rise to the Lost Generation. She explores for the first time the sexual undercurrents that ran beneath Gerald's and Sara's relationships with Picasso, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald and affected the work of all three men. Most important, she evokes both Murphys, and the geniuses who had the good fortune to be their friends, with a clarity and tenderness that makes them virtually step off the page.

In the 1920s, 28‑year‑old Hadley Richardson meets Ernest Hemingway in Chicago, marries him, and together they become Hollywood’s golden couple in Paris, navigating self‑doubt, jealousy, and literary ambition amid the expatriate scene.