Erskine Gwynne was the wealthy publisher of the Paris Boulevardier, a magazine patterned after the New Yorker . The son of Edward Erskine and Helen Steele Gwynne and the great-nephew of Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, Gwynne was educated in France, England, and the United States. In 1926, in Paris, he married Madeleine Armstrong, a great-niece of Jefferson Davis; the marriage ended in divorce in 1932.

Gwynne wrote articles in French for French magazines and contributed to little magazines in the United States and England, but he is best known as the publisher of the Boulevardier, an English-language magazine published in Paris from March 1927 until January 1932 under the editorship of Arthur Moss with Jed Kiley as assistant editor. Boulevardier's tone was set by the editor's preface to the first issue (March 1927), which called the new venture the Anglo-American colony's "very own magazine" and said in part:

Your Boulevardier ... will not tell one...