Wambly Bald was well-known on the Left Bank of Paris as the writer of the weekly column "La Vie de Boheme (As Lived on the Left Bank)," which appeared in the Paris Tribune (the European edition of the Chicago Tribune ) from October 1929 to July 1933. A native of Chicago, Bald graduated from the University of Chicago in 1924, and according to an autobiographical note in Peter Neagoe's Americans Abroad (1932), he "spent several years knocking about over the country with brief lapses of itinerate journalism." Arriving in France in 1929, Bald took a proofreading job at the Paris Tribune and soon began writing his weekly column. Despite repeated offers of promotion to full time on the editorial staff, he chose to remain a proofreader. He returned to the United States in 1934 after the Tribune was merged with the Paris Herald (the European edition of the New York Herald).

Bald's column captured the...