John A. M. Thomas went to Paris to write a novel, but he did not ally himself with the writers and intellectuals of Montparnasse. Instead he became an habitue of the Right Bank and a regular at the Ritz Hotel bar on the rue Cambon. In Thomas's novel. Dry Martini (1926), Willoughby Quimby's favorate bar, the Garden of Allah, is based upon the Ritz Bar. Thomas could afford to indulge his taste for what Morrill Cody calls "the romantic and decadent remains of the Edwardian era which he found on the Right Bank."

The son of socially prominent New Yorkers, Dr. and Mrs. Allen M. Thomas, he graduated from Yale University in 1922. AT Yale, he was chairman of the Yale Literary Magazine and won the Metcalf Prize for a dramatic essay. After graduation, he went to Paris to study at the Sorbonne and to write. Unlike many other young...