SOURCE: Brown, Russell. “Callaghan, Glassco, and the Canadian Lost Generation.” Essays on Canadian Writing 51-2 (winter-spring 1993-94): 83-112.

In the following essay, Brown discusses how Callaghan's memoir That Summer in Paris and John Glassco's Memoirs of Montparnasse challenges the American-in-Paris myth of expatriate life in the 1920s.

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If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you. …

—Ernest Hemingway, epigraph to A Moveable Feast, 1964

The notion, in the years immediately after World War I, that Paris was the best place for artists and intellectuals may have been true, but it functioned chiefly as a myth: that is, it embodied a cluster of unarticulated assumptions, it shaped decisions and attitudes in ways that went beyond rational appeal, and it generated many narratives.

Emerging in something like its enduring form by...