SOURCE: “And Others Too,” in From Harlem to Paris, University of Illinois Press, 1991, pp. 129-144.

In the following essay, Fabre discusses African-American writers living in Paris, including Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, and Walter White.

The 1920s and 1930s were indeed the heyday of American visitors in France, both black and white. These included not only the wealthy set but also a small number of race leaders on partly official, partly pleasure, trips; a good number of artists and even more musicians; and most of the luminaries of the New Negro movement, starting with Alain Locke. Langston Hughes came even before he was an established writer, while Claude McKay initiated the fashion of living abroad. Even more than Anna Cooper, Jessie Fauset, or Gwendolyn Bennett, Countee Cullen was such an assiduous student of French culture that he spent his summers in Paris. But others also came and stayed: the...