SOURCE: Kennedy, J. Gerald. “Modernism as Exile: Fitzgerald, Barnes, and the Unreal City.” In Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity, pp. 185-242. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

In the following excerpt, Kennedy discusses F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night in light of some American writers' attempts to go into voluntary exile in Paris in order to refresh their cultural perceptions.

Gertrude Stein remarked that modernist writers and artists of her time had converged on the capital of France because “Paris was where the twentieth century was.” The city not only incorporated within its diverse cultural life the most distinctive projects and features of modernism, but (as her claim implies) it had also become a geographical sign of the modern. Other European cities—notably Vienna, Berlin, and London—had harbored important avant-garde coteries during the two decades bracketing the turn of the century, but by 1910, Paris had...